[Commlist] Autumn 2023 speaker series Science, Health, and Data Communications Research

The Centre for*Science, Health, and Data Communications*Research invites 
you to our Autumn 2023 speaker series. Featuring researchers from around 
the world, these online talks are open to the public and encompass 
topics on crisis communication, climate change and sustainability; 
media, data and AI literacy; social justice communication and how the 
arts and storytelling can help tackle global challenges.

*All events take place on zoom - Thursdays 16:00-17:00 UK time *

Find out more and [Register%20for%20events%20on%20EventBrite.]Register 
for events on EventBrite. (https://bit/ly/SHDCevents 
<https://bit/ly/SHDCevents>)

*12/10   Sarah Jones              Uncovering a literacy for AI 
*Literacies have been well documented from media to the digital and more 
recently immersive. With an increase in the use of generative AI tools 
and the impact that this is having on an increasing number of sectors, 
this talk will argue for the need for an AI literacy. It will examine 
frameworks for understanding how to use artificial intelligence and the 
need to be constantly evolving our thinking when it comes to technology.

*19/10   Suntosh Pillay           The limitations of #BlackLivesMatter 
for anti-racist activism in the global south *It is unlikely that you 
know the name Collins Khosa. However, you would know the name George 
Floyd.  This is no accident. The media, as a global epistemic authority, 
produces, polices and perpetuates a knowledge system that favours the 
Global North. I present a comparative analysis of the murders of Khosa 
in South Africa (April 2020) and Floyd in the U.S. (May 2020). Despite 
its quasi-universal appeal, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has an ironic 
proximity to whiteness within the United States that provide BLM with 
epistemic advantages not enjoyed elsewhere, especially in poor 
‘township’ contexts of South Africa. I argue that anti-racist activism 
in global south contexts must guard against uncritically importing 
northern-centric forms of protest, such as #BlackLivesMatter. The US has 
particularities that distracts the media gaze, (mis)directing social 
justice activism away from black lived experiences in countries such as 
South Africa, reinforcing silences, epistemic injustices, and colonial 
continuities.

*26/10   Tessa Jolls    Media Literacy: A Strategy for Risk Management 
in an Uncertain World*With new AI technologies, as well as the cacaphony 
of voices that have emerged through social media, it is clear that the 
call for a media ecosystem that only contains “the truth” or that 
contains little or no misinformation or disinformation is a utopian 
dream that only invites more discord and polarization, or worse, highly 
contestable labelling and censorship.  Meaning lies in the minds and 
hearts of information users, and with this recognition, media literacy 
offers a pathway toward dialogue and risk management strategies that 
encompass both qualitative and quantitative analyses and reflection, 
based on a fundamental understanding of media as a global symbolic 
system.  With this in mind, media literacy offers the questions — not 
“the answers” — for exploring and interrogating media in all its forms, 
individually and collectively.  This empowerment enables wiser choices 
throughout life and societies.

*02/11   An Nguyen     Global South’s over-reliance on science news from 
Global North: causes, consequences and solutions *Developing countries 
rely heavily on the developed world for not only scientific expertise 
but also science news output. From Africa and the Middle East to South 
America and developing parts of Asia, a large proportion of science news 
consumed in the Global South has been found to be translated or, at 
best, synthesised from foreign sources, especially global media outlets 
based in the Global North. Such reliance is a double-edged sword: while 
it helps to enhance general awareness and understanding of global 
science developments in the Global South, this double-layered structure 
of dependency bears many negative long-and short-term implications for 
local and global development. Drawing on recent content analyses and 
in-depth interviews with science journalists in Southeast Asia and the 
Middle East, this paper will address this critically important, but 
rarely studied, phenomenon. I will discuss the causes and impacts of 
such over-reliance on foreign sources and offers some thoughts on 
potential solutions to the problem. In general, this requires a holistic 
approach and international cooperation efforts to address the many 
traditional shortfalls of science and science news cultures in the 
Global South.

*9/11     Sweta Baniya Transnational Assemblages: Social Justice and 
Communication During Disaster *

*16/11   Kayla Jones   The Power of Podcasting: Audio Storytelling 
Beyond Entertainment*With the rise in popularity of audio listening, 
podcast studies is a growing field of research that is responding to 
podcasts that have gone mainstream, such as Serial. Audio storytelling 
podcasts can be a powerful tool to advocate for, connect with, and 
educate global audiences. Through creating her own podcast, Kayla 
explored the ways storytelling podcasts can tell multilayered narratives 
beyond the realm of entertainment and in non-fiction settings, like 
heritage and tourism.

*23/11   Antonio Lopez           Algorithms and the Climate Emergency: 
An Ecomedia Literacy Perspective*Whether it’s blockchain technologies or 
disinformation, Big Tech algorithms have a significant environmental 
impact. The economic models of surveillance and carbon capitalism are 
both based on extractivism, so data harvesting and resources extraction 
practices mirror each other in Big Tech algorithms. To encourage a 
holistic environmental analysis of algorithms, ecomedia literacy’s four 
zone approach enables an investigation from the perspectives of 
ecoculture, political ecology, ecomateriality, and lifeworld. For media 
literacy educators and reformers, the challenge is to develop curricula 
and methods that address these different standpoints, which can include 
critical media literacy, design justice, civic media literacies, news 
and misinformation literacies, and ethical algorithm audits.

*30/11   Andrea Winkler-Vilhena       The art of presence*Throughout 
history the Arts have been used to address societal issues, to see and 
show the world in diverse ways, and to imagine and create new futures. 
Nowadays, every aspect of life has become so entangled with digital 
media that it is impossible to speak about the world without considering 
the effects they have on our lives. How do we relate to and interact 
with people when our attention is absorbed by digital gadgets? What does 
presence mean in a world in which a big part of human relationships and 
communication happens in virtual spaces? In this lecture we will explore 
how the Arts can be used to promote media literacy and how seeing, 
interacting with and making art can revive our sense of presence and 
promote care and imagination.

*7/12     Annamaria Neag       Youth digital activism and online media: 
from digital exclusion to the complexities of civic participation*Since 
the second half of the 2000s, there has been an increasing interest in 
the relationship between internet use and civic participation. While 
initially this interest was geared towards the adult population, 
researchers have shifted their attention to young people and their 
activism in the digital sphere. In this talk, I will present the 
research findings of our ongoing project focusing on young people in the 
CEE region (namely, the Czech Republic and Hungary) and their (online) 
involvement in the Fridays for Future movement. We first mapped the 
online public discourse on youth civic participation in these two 
countries and then focused on young people’s views on activism and the 
digital skills needed to participate. Our results show that online 
commenters use specific strategies to exclude young people from the 
public sphere. When it comes to young people and their views on digital 
activism, we found that digital media plays a rather complex and 
contradictory role in their civic participation, with its affordances 
providing both opportunities and challenges in terms of mental 
well-being, non-formal education and community-building.

*14/12   Arseli Dokumaci       Shrinkage and Activist Affordances: How 
disabled people improvise more habitable worlds*For people living with 
disability, everyday tasks like lifting a glass or taking off clothes 
can be daunting. As such, their undertakings may require ingenuity, 
effort and artfulness. In this talk, I draw on visual ethnographies with 
disabled people living in Turkey and Quebec, and trace the immense 
labour and creativity that it takes for them just to navigate the 
everyday. Bringing together theories of affordance, performance, and 
disability, I propose “activist affordances” as a way to name and 
recognize these extremely tiny and yet profoundly artistic 
choreographies that disabled people have to continually rehearse to make 
the world more habitable for themselves and others. Activist 
affordances, in the way I define them, are micro, often ephemeral acts 
of world-building, with which disabled people literally make up, and at 
the same time make up for, whatever affordances fail to materialize in 
their environments. Activist affordances are not like any other 
affordance in that their creation emerges from constraints, losses and 
precarity that I broadly conceptualize as “shrinkage”. It is within a 
shrinking world of possibilities, that it becomes necessary to create 
affordances in their physical absence, which is why I call them 
“activist”. Even as an environment shrinks to a set of constraints 
rather than opportunities, the improvisatory space of performance allows 
disabled people to imagine that same environment otherwise through 
activist affordances, presenting the potential for a more livable and 
accessible world.**

**/The Centre for*Science, Health, and Data 
Communications*Research//focuses on the urgent need for better science, 
health and data communication through ambitious cross-disciplinary 
collaborations. Bringing together experts from various disciplines – 
media and communication, computer and data sciences, health and medical 
sciences, environment sciences, business studies, psychology and 
sociology – we research and pioneer interdisciplinary solutions for 
contemporary communication challenges. From reporting statistics, to 
tackling disinformation, from health and wellness interventions to more 
efficient communication around environmental and humanitarian disasters, 
our members respond to real world issues—often in real time. For more 
about our centre or to get in touch, please 
visithttps://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/centres-institutes/centre-science-health-data-communication-research 
<https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/centres-institutes/centre-science-health-data-communication-research>/

/Checkout past events and subscribe to ourYouTube channel 
<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb5RlDCyrUrQ0efjsWq7fMw/about>(@SHDCresearch) 
/

/Follow us on Instagram and X (Twitter) @SHDCresearch/

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