‘Diaspora, migration and the media’ was the theme of an academic conference hosted at NUI Maynooth by the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) in December.
Various speakers discussed the relationship between diaspora groups and the media, and how they threw up challenges that are central to humanities, social sciences, anthropology and cultural/media studies.
Olga Bailey of Nottingham Trent University’s Institute of Cultural Analysis, who chaired proceedings, said the aim of the conference was “to assess the relevance, impact, consequences and politics of the ‘keywords’ and theories currently dominant in the field.”
Monika Metykova of Northumbria University spoke about the intersection of “old keywords” such as race, class and gender, and how they intersect with the “new keywords” in today’s academic writing, and whether this translates into media policy.
Bailey, meanwhile, asked what is “gained and lost” in the process of European exchange and translation through a single dominant language.
“What can we observe in the process of shifting from and towards different theoretical paradigms?” she asked. “Has there, for example, been a turn to theories of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘diversity’?”
Among the participants were researchers, PhD students and non-academics interested in the field. For further information visit www.ecrea.eu.
