The Salzburg Academy, a program of the Salzburg Global Seminar in Salzburg, Austria, and the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA), brings together for three weeks every summer undergraduate and graduate students from a broad variety of top universities around the world. Faculty and deans of these universities participate in the Academy, giving lectures and acting as mentors to small teams of students. The 2008 session was the second year of the program.

The premise of the Academy is to explore the media's role in global progress, pluralism, and citizenship. The Academy mission is to encourage collaboration across countries, continents and cultures. Students and faculty assemble to engage in debate, and construct curricular products that explore new understandings of global media systems and their influence on political and civil society.

The Academy, in many ways, defines a truly global initiative. Attendees of the Academy have come from the following countries: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, England, Germany, Israel, Kenya, Kuwait, Mexico, Namibia, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, and the United States of America. The Academy has also secured concrete partnerships with UNESCO, and the UN Alliance of Civilizations. These organizations have enlisted to support the Academy's role in ensuring dialog and collaboration across countries and continents. The result has been an Academy rigorous in its exploration of global media and successful in creating outcomes that reflect the pluralistic nature of the program.

In 2007 & 2008, over 115 students from five continents and 30 faculty and deans from 19 universities came together at the Salzburg Global Seminar to create a global media literacy curriculum and accompanying teaching modules focusing on climate change and terrorism

Building off the successes of the first two Academy programs, students and faculty in 2009 will further explore media's role in global communities and civil society. The 2009 Academy will run from 26 July - 15 August. The Salzburg Academy is conceived to answer two of the most pressing questions of our time:

"How do news media affect our understanding of ourselves, our cultures, our politics?" and

"How can we use media to better cover global problems and to better report on possible solutions?"

MORE DETAILS

• For more information on the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change and to see the curricular tools that the students created, CLICK HERE.
• For more information about the 2009 Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change, CLICK HERE
• Students, universities, foundations, and other organizations interested in learning more about how they can become involved in the Program should contact Paul Mihailidis, Ph.D.
  pmihailidis@salzburgglobal.org
  516-463-5226