IAMCR contribution to the 2013 UNESCO initiative “Towards a Global Alliance on Media and Gender”

IAMCR Newsletter | November 2013

Back to the Newsletter

IAMCR contribution to the 2013 UNESCO initiative Towards a Global Alliance on Media and Gender

The 1995 Beijing Platform for Action put forward strategies that would make it possible for the women’s human rights in media and information technologies to have allies. “Chapter J” identified core areas for the gender and media agenda.

The Platform was a catalyst for feminist research. Since then feminist scholars from all regions of the world acted –sometimes individually, others collectively- on three levels: providing knowledge, setting the public agenda on gender and communication debates and formulating policy.

During the next few months core international events are taking place to review the main advances and remaining challenges in the areas identified by the Platform. One of those events is the 2013 UNESCO initiative “Towards a Global Alliance on Media and Gender”. This initiative includes short-term and long-term actions. Short-term include actions related to the recent International Women’s Day on 8 March. Long-term includes the Global Forum on Media and Gender (GFMG), to be held in December 2013, in Bangkok.

IAMCR was invited to take part in this initiative. IAMCR President Janet Wasko considered this an opportunity to act collectively, by contributing as a community of scholars to the development of the debates on Gender and Media.

Some actions have been taken since then. We began by eliciting responses and proposals from members to define priority themes that the GFMG should address. Some ideas surfaced during the Special Session “Towards a Global Alliance on Media and Gender”, held in the 2013 IAMCR Conference, in Dublin. This session was fruitful in terms of posing strategies on how to act collectively –and wisely- and making the knowledge scholars produce useful, particularly for debating with those actors that play a key role in this area -international organizations, governments, media organizations, advocates, and NGO’s.

Thus, and towards the GFMG, IAMCR will prepare a publication –in digital format, with the support of UNESCO. The aim of this publication is to draw attention to some of the most significant scholarly contributions related to both to knowledge and action towards expanding women’s human right to communicate. It is expected that this publication will serve to make a statement, as a community, towards the role UNESCO needs to play to firmly advance improvement in gender and communication at global, regional and national levels.

At the same time, we have been working on IAMCR’s participation in the Global Forum. Our association will lead the scholarly debate by organizing two sessions on 'A Scholarly Agenda for the Global Alliance on Media and Gender'.

Finally, we want to announce that registration is now open for the Global Forum on Media Gender (click to view news). The official website of the Global Forum on Media and Gender is also now available online.

We expect these activities to constitute the contribution of the IAMCR community to the core debate UNESCO is fostering. At the same time, we hope that this project promotes a feminist politics of sorority among scholars, based on respect, recognition and collective accountability.

Best wishes/Salud
Aimée Vega Montiel, CEIICH-UNAM