MONTREAL – Canadian communication policy has shifted. New media are no longer new. Convergence has come and gone and even come again. Policy makers are chipping away at facet after facet of the emerging networked mediascape.
But what role should Canadian communication researchers play in this policy environment? How can their work inform, influence, and shift the agendas of policymakers in Canadian jurisdictions? Should it at all? And just whose work is at issue, as a new generation of communications researchers, activists, and decision-makers begins to take its place in Canadian institutions?
Questions like these are a growing part of the communications research agenda in the U.S., Europe, and other political spaces. The Montreal Media Policy Group, an association of newer communication scholars working across a variety of disciplines at the four local Montreal universities (McGill, Concordia, U de M, UQAM), seek to widen the conversation within the Canadian context and will do so from November 9-10 at McGill.
The day-and-a-half gathering will be held with the support of the Beaverbrook Chair in Ethics, Media and Communications at McGill University and the SSHRC Strategic Research Cluster on Media Governance.
Titled Converging In Parallel, it will take the form of an informal conference.
Eligible participants are:
* Graduate students and new faculty members who were recently enrolled in doctoral programs, and
* Government policy, regulatory, and agency staff, industry stakeholders, and non-governmental and civil society actors with up to seven years of professional experience in the communications policy sector.
* Emerging advocates, activists, or critics with a demonstrated engagement in the communications policy or regulatory processes in Canada.
Participants to the conference are invited to present, comment and discuss in either French or English. The position statements that accepted participants forwarded as part of their expressions of interest (and the deadline to submit is today) will be posted to a conference web site. Participants will be expected to read these prior to the conference, and to be prepared to engage with these positions and with conference participants in a spirit of dialogue.
The conference will be organized in a series of six panels. Two panels will be followed by buffet dinner and drinks on Thursday afternoon and evening. Four panels will be punctuated by a lunch keynote on Friday. The six panels will last ninety minutes each.
Panels will stress comments, questions, and discussions and will be organized with an eye to mixing academic speakers with respondents speaking from a policymaking, industry, or civil society stakeholder role.
Panelists will be allotted ten minutes to allow for further group discussion. The conference’s final panel will involve more senior scholars/policymakers/activists. Philip Napoli of Fordham University will be a keynote speaker as he’ll be able to share some of his experience through similar work in the U.S.
Possible themes to be covered include:
1. Regulating convergence: What institutional frameworks? CRTC, Competition Bureau, Heritage Canada, Industry Canada, and more.
2. Public broadcasting: Where are we headed? From Radio 3 to ad-free programming to Freeplay, and back again.
3. Canadian content under license: Walled garden or barbed wire? Cancon and the looming post-license landscape.
4. Media concentration: is anybody listening? Measuring, monitoring, and pondering media market power
5. Specialty channels and generalist broadcasters face the Internet. Industry panel — competing market participants in the academic gaze.
6. Research and policy, circling warily: what should matter to whom? Foreign communications policy researchers on their foray into Canada.
Anyone interested in attending should send a note saying so to parallel@bazu.org, asap.
