Workshop theme

II INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON IDENTITY AND CULTURE

Media and plural identities in a multicultural Europe

 Audio-visual media play a main role in contemporary societies. They are essential tools for the social construction of reality: they produce information, bring groups together, and spread values, habits and behavior patterns. The media also define collective identities politically. In nation-states, the media secrete references, symbols and common stories that we assimilate without realizing it. Minority cultures, in contrast, aspire to have their own broadcaster, generally conceived as a public service, in order to satisfactorily articulate their own identity, their internal diversity and their openness to the world.

The aim of this Workshop is to explore this landscape, bringing experts together to present the challenges and opportunities of creating a new public broadcasting service that is able to achieve a balance between tradition and modernity, information and entertainment, the protection of minority languages and multilingualism… The Workshop aims at comparing the related experiences in several European countries from different perspectives (political initiative, legislation, resources, broadcast structure, content selection, policy). The contrastive analyses and the reflections derived from this workshop can be a noteworthy contribution to public debate in the context of the challenge that we are now facing in this country: creating a multiplatform (television, radio, Internet) public media service which gives a proper focus to the communication needs of a highly complex society such as the Valencian one.

The Workshop will be held on September 21st and 22nd at the Faculty of Philology, Translation and Communication of the Universitat de València.

A call for papers in Catalan, Spanish and English will be announced.