Communication history of International Organizations and NGOs: Questions, research perspectives, topics

Communication history of International Organizations and NGOs: Questions, research perspectives, topics

Organizer
Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung - ZeMKI, Universität Bremen; Fachgruppe Kommunikationsgeschichte, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft - DGPuK; Institut für Zeitungsforschung, Dortmund; Verein zur Förderung der Zeitungsforschung in Dortmund e.V.
Venue
ZeMKI Universität Bremen, Online
ZIP
28359
Location
Bremen
Country
Germany
From - Until
22.04.2021 - 23.04.2021
By
Erik Koenen, Universität Bremen

The conference will focus on a topic that has thus far received little attention from historians of communication and media: the communication history of international organizations. The aim of the conference is to discover and systematically develop international organizations as a communication and media history relevant field of research.

Communication history of International Organizations and NGOs: Questions, research perspectives, topics

The International ZeMKI Conference 2021 will focus on a topic that has thus far received little attention from historians of communication and media: the communication history of international organizations. Since the second half of the 19th century, for numerous and diverse areas of social life, globally active international organizations of varying degrees of institutionalization and scope, both non-governmental and intergovernmental, have been founded and have dedicated themselves to the global challenges of the first modern age. The most famous of these is certainly the League of Nations, which was established in 1919 as the predecessor institution of the UN.

From a communication and media-historical perspective, international organizations played a highly visible role in the transnational intertwining and consolidation processes of journalism, culture, media, politics, technology and the public sphere in the 19th and 20th centuries. Against the background of the much-discussed boundaries between secret diplomacy and public diplomacy, especially after the First World War, such organizations contributed to the development of the first arenas and forms of international and transnational public spheres whose orientation was towards global governance. In order to spread their concerns and goals globally: they constantly used the latest communication technologies and the growing diversity of the media for their communication; organized and professionalized their information work and; developed specific information-policy instruments and strategies for that purpose. Woodrow Wilson's idea of Open Diplomacy (in fact, the early forerunner of today's “Public Diplomacy”), for example, was the idea on which the League of Nations based its information policy.

Effects of the differentiation and organization of international organizations’ communication, such as the emergence of institutionalized public relations and PR in these specific contexts, the development of international summit and conference journalism, the creation of publicity for international politics and, in parallel, the genesis of structures of inter- and transnational public spheres conveyed by the media, are issues and topics within this field of research, which from the perspective of communication and media history has been by and large neglected.

The aim of the conference is to discover and systematically develop international organizations as a communication and media history relevant field of research. In doing so, the conference will lay the foundations for research in communication history as well as offering the discipline as a whole a historical perspective that will enable communication studies to reflect on international organizations of the present day.

Programm

Donnerstag, 22. April 2021

9.00-9.45 Welcome Notes

9.45-10.45 Keynote Madeleine Herren-Oesch

11.00-12.30 Panel 1: Remembering the League of Nations
Chair: Kaarle Nordenstreng (Tampere)

11.00-11.30 Fei Huang (Beijing): The 1919 Moment Revisited: Two versions of Self-determination and the background of League of Nations
11.30-12.00 Peter de Bourgraaf (Amsterdam): Postcolonial IO Cultures of Remembrance? Mind the gap!
12.00-12.30 Soonim Shin (Vienna): Albert Cohens literarische Satire auf den Völkerbund: „Belle du seigneur“

13.00-14.00 Panel 2: How to Mediate International Organizations
Chair: Emil Eiby Seidenfaden (Oxford)

13.00-13.30 Kaiyi Li (Braunschweig): Teaching the League of Nations: An attempt of cultivating international consensus during the interwar period
13.30-14.00 Miriam Goetz (Düsseldorf): Internationale Organisationen in der Öffentlichkeit und öffentlichen Debatten: Die UN im Spiegel serbischer und kroatischer Karikaturen (1986-2008)

14.30-15.30 Panel 3: Norm building and Communication in International Organizations
Chair: Thomas Birkner (Münster)

14.30-15.00 Sarah Nelson (Nashville): The Anticolonial Struggle to Universalize “Information Freedom” through International Organizations in the 20th Century
15.00-15.30 Jürgen Wilke (Mainz): The Prevalence of Communication. A case study on the early International Labour Organisation (ILO)

Freitag, 23. April 2021

9.00-10.00 Keynote Torsten Kahlert (Wolfenbüttel)

10.30-11.30 Panel 4: Communicating Europe
Chair: Astrid Blome (Dortmund)

10.30-11.00 Anne Bruch (Hamburg): "Mission Europe". The Communication Policy of the European Institutions and their early audio-visual Public Relations Campaigns (1948-1973)
11.00-11.30 Ines Soldwisch (Aachen): Das Europäische Parlament als Kommunikationsraum – Konstituierung, Organisation und Wahrnehmung durch die Abgeordneten

12.30-14.00 Panel 5: Case studies in Internationalism
Chair: Arne L. Gellrich (Bremen)

12.30-13.00 Pelle van Dijk (Florence): Internationalism on Display: Case studies on the League of Nations in the member states
13.00-13.30 Arvind Rajagopal (New York): International Organizations and National Communication Systems: India’s Satellite Television Experiment, Unesco and Ford Foundation
13.30-14.00 Roja Zaitoonie (Bochum): The Policy-Making of the United Nations in the Field of Media and Public Communication – A Historical Comparison between the General Assembly and the Security Council

14.30-15.30 Panel 6: Risk and Development Communication
Chair: Christian Schwarzenegger (Salzburg)

14.30-15.00 Lukas Schemper (Berlin): International Organisations and the Communication of Risk: the example of the Atomic Energy Agency in the 1970s-1980s
15.00-15.30 Sigrid Kannengießer (Bremen): From Millennium Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals: Transforming development communication to sustainability communication?

Résumé Erik Koenen/Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz

Contact (announcement)

Please subscribe till 20th of April 2021 via Email to "kommge@uni-bremen.de" You will personally receive a ZOOM-Link shortly before the event. It is possible to visit presentations by choice.

https://www.uni-bremen.de/en/zemki/events/conferences/communication-history-of-international-organizations-and-ngos
Editors Information
Published on
31.03.2021
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