[ecrea] CFP: One Planet -- One Humanity

“One Planet – One Humanity: Communications For and Against”

An International, Interdisciplinary, Research-Planning Conference

Benedictine University, May 29-31, 2014



CALL FOR PAPERS



Deadline: January 20, 2014





We are seeking proposals by academicians from the sciences, social 
sciences, media studies, and the humanities who are interested in 
participating in the conference and in developing papers on the 
conference theme.



Please send resume and 600-word abstract to Luigi Manca and Jean-Marie 
Kauth, conference coordinators ((lmanca /at/ ben.edu); (jkauth /at/ ben.edu)). Each 
proposal will be reviewed by a panel composed of members of the 
conference organizing committee. The committee includes members from a 
variety of disciplines.



The purpose of this research-planning conference is to bring together 
scholars from different disciplines who are interested in discussing the 
emergence of an interconnected humanity in an interconnected world and 
the role of the mass media of communication in this process.



Today’s media are failing humanity. The interconnected spiritual reality 
of humans has been contaminated by a pervasive, irresponsible, and 
dysfunctional use at the global level of the mass media of 
communication. Rather than providing pictures of reality on which the 
world’s citizens can act, the corporate-controlled media are widely used 
as instruments of commercial and political propaganda, creating an 
immense web of images and narratives that their creators know to be not 
true – fabrications designed to sell, to manipulate, and in a sense, to 
enslave worldwide audiences. Under these conditions, it is not possible 
for the human race to achieve any true awareness of itself and of its 
habitat, and to develop an adequate orientation about the issues 
confronting the world today.



And the systematic destruction of our future goes on.



This conference is about the media and about liberation from the 
dominant images and narratives of consumer society.



At the core of this discussion is a rather simple utopian vision of one 
planet for a unified humanity – billions of people whose destinies and 
dreams are interconnected and interdependent, and who share the same 
planet. One planet – one humanity. It is a vision of a world not divided 
into separate countries or separate ethnic or religious communities all 
competing or even going to war against one another over the exploitation 
of the available resources. It is a vision of a world in which we all 
share responsibly for the common human habitat. From this point of view, 
issues such as global warming, world-wide pollution, and the systematic 
destruction of the environment are immediately connected to human rights 
issues because these issues impact our ability to fulfill our needs and 
dreams in the one living planet we all share, and because our own 
survival as a species may very well be at stake here.



If we look at the media from the point of view of this utopian vision we 
must first realize that the media industry is not controlled by the 
people but by the corporations. Corporate interests exercise a monopoly 
control over the media and, through them, over the images and narratives 
that reach worldwide audiences. We must also realize that the interests 
of the corporate structure that controls the available resources and 
that pollutes the human physical and cultural habitat are on a collision 
course with the interests of this one, interconnected humanity. These 
corporate interests are not necessarily unified by a single agenda. In 
fact, multi-national corporations compete against one another in a 
continued struggle for control of markets, resources, political 
influence, and profits. What does unify these corporate interests is the 
need to continue to support and expand a consumer economy that is based 
on the exploitation of people and resources, the eventual destruction of 
the environment, and the contamination of public discourse.



Still, we don’t see the media necessarily as the enemy. Instead, we see 
the multinational corporations who control the media and compete to 
advance their profits and influence as the enemy. In fact, if freed from 
the corporate control, the media can help us change the world. For the 
first time in human history, we now have the kinds of media of 
communication that could potentially connect all the people in the 
planet with one another and with the huge body of accumulated knowledge, 
art, and culture. As the extensions of humans, the media can be 
instruments of salvation instead of destruction, liberation instead of 
oppression.



The conference will run for three days and will consist of one on-going 
plenary session in which each participant presents his or her ideas, 
after which we all engage in general discussion. While we don’t want to 
have separate simultaneous sessions, we can have some breaks long enough 
for people to get together in smaller groups to discuss whatever they want.



We intend to limit the total number of people attending the conference 
to 25.



One intended outcome of the conference is the compilation of a book 
provisionally entitled One Planet – One Humanity: Communications For and 
Against. The book will consist of a peer-reviewed selection of some of 
the essays developed through the conference.



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