International Media & Conflict Resolution Conference

Last weekend, we hosted a truly special gathering of scholars and practitioners in the areas of media, journalism, international relations, communications, psychology, law, and dispute resolution. I will be blogging a few more times about the conference, abstracts, and upcoming issue of the Marquette Law Review on the symposium, but wanted, for now, to post a couple responses to the conference that I received from attendees.

One of our alums who attended, Evelyn Ang, sent me this clip in light of what we had talked about regarding the impact of changing media. Truly an amazing video! Another alum, Amy Koltz, noted, “I found the speakers engaging and the presentations thought-provoking — I’m amazed at the group of presenters you were able to pull together and bring to Marquette.”  She also provided a link to this article from Haaretz on media coverage of Israel and noted that it could have been a presentation in the conference. Our own program manager and conference planner, Natalie Fleury, heard this story on NPR Monday morning about Al Qaida’s training manual on the Internet, directly linking to Gabriel Weimann’s talk on Saturday.

And, from 2L part-time law student (and full-time veterinarian) Marty Greer, came this summary of the conference for those who missed it:

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International Media and Conflict Resolution Conference

I am in the midst of final planning for our conference this weekend on the media and conflict resolution. Blog readers (and others) are all invited! The International Media and Conflict Resolution Conference will bring together experts from diverse fields to discuss the influence of different forms of media in the development, escalation, and de-escalation of conflict. An international cadre of journalists, legal academics, psychologists, communication professors, and conflict resolution professionals who live and work in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East will gather at the Law School for sessions analyzing the dynamics of media and conflict resolution in the following topic areas: (1) Separation/Independence; (2) Terrorism; and (3) Elections and Conflict. 

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W(h)ither Newspapers—and Their Cities?

Newspapers have long been an important part of my life. Whether it was, if returning home from downtown Chicago with my mother in the 1970s, the effort to ensure that we secured for my father the “final markets” edition of that day’s Chicago Daily News (not merely the “latest markets,” I was taught to discriminate), or reading the New York Times in the 1980s while off in college and getting a broader sense of the world, or in the 1990s moving to Milwaukee and coming to know my adoptive city in part through its paper (regrettably, after it had become a one-newspaper town), newspapers have been for me, as for so many others, more than even the primary source of news. That remains the case, even if we are “reduced” at home to taking the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Chicago Tribune.

Today of course the internet offers both access to far more newspapers than even an out-of-town newsstand (to use an almost anachronistic term) and a threat to their viability, it seems. I wonder what the effect of this will be on our own region.

While I have been wondering about this for a while (or at least since Doonesbury was recently removed from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, presumably for expense reasons), an essay in the most recent New Yorker by James Surowiecki particularly prompts this post.

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