IViR is pleased to announce that
Prof. Victor Pickard
will give a lecture entitled
Reimagining Local Media Infrastructures: Non-Reformist Media Reforms to Better Serve Democratic Needs
on 18 December 2024
We learn as children that democracy requires a functional press system as a prerequisite for a self-governing society. There is also a general consensus that all communities have informational needs that a local media system must serve. Increasingly, however, local media institutions are collapsing under commercial pressures and these democratic requirements are not being met.
In this presentation, I will analyze some of the structural problems afflicting our information and communication systems. I will conclude by proposing “non-reformist media reforms” that can help us reimagine and redesign our local media infrastructures so that they better serve democratic needs.
Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center. Pickard’s research focuses on media history, journalism studies, and the normative foundations of media policy. He has published more than 150 articles, book chapters, and essays, and he often writes for popular venues such as The Guardian, The Washington Post, Jacobin, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, and The Nation. He has authored or edited six books, including the award-winning monographs America’s Battle for Media Democracy and Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society. He is currently working on a book that explores how capitalist logics structure information and communication infrastructures along anti-democratic lines.
Practical details
Date: 18 December 2024
Time: 15:30 – 16:45 CET (Amsterdam)
Place:
– IViR Room, REC A5.24, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, 1018 WV Amsterdam.
– Online via Zoom (you will receive the Zoomlink via e-mail on the morning of the lecture).
See also the flyer.