5 students attend global Salzburg Academy

Five Emerson students and two faculty members attended the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change in Salzburg, Austria, from July 20 to August 9, joining students and academic leaders from 23 countries.

For the past eight summers, the academy has brought together students to work on innovative case studies to impact media dialogue and global change. Guest speakers included Anthony Kennedy, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; playwright Tom Stoppard; author Richard Ford; Washington Post investigative reporter Dana Priest; and BP/Goldman Sachs chairman Peter Sutherland.

Paul Mihailidis, assistant professor in Emerson’s Marketing Communication Department, serves as director of the Salzburg Academy and was there with Associate Professor Eric Gordon of Visual and Media Arts. Gordon and Mihailidis are the director and associate director, respectively, of Emerson’s Engagement Lab.

The Emerson students who attended the academy were Shantal Erlich ’15 of Marketing Communication, Cameron Holbrook ’15 of Communication Studies, Paulina Pascual ’15 of VMA, Kate Rosenzweig ’15 of VMA, and Sarah Tedesco ’16 of Journalism.

The academy participants are working with members of the United Nations Development Program’s Knowledge, Innovation, and Capacity Group on issues of the environment, poverty reduction, and human rights to brainstorm media-oriented solutions to these issues, and will present their ideas to UNDP members.

Other ongoing projects at Salzburg involve creating short videos on how media can facilitate global change, and how students can work to improve the media; a research project investigating stereotypes and diversity in global digital culture; and photography projects that investigate how images can visualize global concepts.