Annenberg noon time colloquium - Amelia Arsenault

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

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Amelia Arsenault serves as one of two George Gerbner Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School. She recently completed her doctoral work on the subject of information and state power in southern Africa at the University of Southern California, Annenberg School. While at USC she also served as the Wallis Annenberg Graduate Fellow to Manuel Castells and as a Research Associate at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. Her research interests include: communication and power; media and ICT ownership; media and ICT for development; and public diplomacy. She holds a B.A. in Film and History from Dartmouth College and an MSc in Global Media and Communication from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to graduate school, Amelia worked as the film coordinator for the Zimbabwe International Film Festival Trust in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Abstract:

In South Africa, poor communications infrastructure, legacies of colonialism and apartheid, and the presence of a mobilized set of stakeholders pushing for full and equitable African participation in the information society combined to create an information environment subject to enormous political, economic, and social power struggles. This talk presents the results of a case study of US efforts to participate in this ongoing process of negotiation over the form and content of the South African information environment from 1992 to the present. How have media diplomacy, lobbying for US communications businesses, and encouraging media and communications rules and regulations been used as a tool of international relationships by the United States vis-à-vis South Africa, and to what effect?