Call for Candidates - S&WG Head elections 2021

Ethics Society and Ethics of Communication Working Group

The Ethics of Society and Ethics of Communication Working Group (ETH) will be holding online elections for one Chair and two Vice-chair positions, for the term 2021 - 2025.

The elections will be held online from 16 June until 14 September using the SurveyMonkey platform. Individual members and representatives of institutional members who are also registered as members of the ETH working group are eligible to stand for a position and to vote.

Interested candidates must send their name, institutional position, a statement of no more than 500 words and a photograph to elections [at] iamcr.org no later than 16 May.

All candidates must be current members of IAMCR, and of the ETH working group. To verify if you are a member of the working group, log in to your IAMCR account and select “My Sections and Working Groups” from the menu.

You can find the election rules at: https://iamcr.org/governance/swg-rules

Read about the Ethics Society and Ethics of Communication Working Group

Candidates

For Chair:

For Vice-chair:

Statements

Elvira Garcia de Torres (Department of Communication and Journalism. CEU Cardenal Herrera University, Spain)

Dear colleagues:

I have been an active member of IAMCR and the Ethics of Society and Ethics of Communication Working Group for the past ten years. Since 2015, I have been honored to serve as Vice-Chair  and Co-Chair, assisting Maria Teresa Nicolás outstanding efforts in reinforcing the WG  following the path set by the WG founder, Dr. Manuel Parés, former IAMCR President and firm advocate of the promotion of the study of the Ethics of Communication. It is with the support of María Teresa Nicolás  Gavilán and Ben-Hur Demeneck as Vice-Chairs, that I present my candidacy to Chair the WG.  I am sure that, with their help and your collaboration, the WG will be able:

  • To finally become a Section
  • Maintain its independence and
  • Give research in Ethics & Communication the status it deserves.

As Head of the WG I have been involved in the organization of successful pre and post-Conferences (Cartagena, 2017; Leicester, 2016; Barcelona, 2019)  in collaboration with Journalism Section and Sport Section; in Tampere 2020, we organized one of the innovative video pre-recorded meetings. We have also provided impulse to the Business Meetings previous to the pandemics: at the 2018 Conference the members of the group actively participated in designing activities for Madrid 2019, which we expect to maintain in the future, developing new strategies for hybrid or online environments. The steady number of proposals each year reflects the strength of the WG and the group's attraction for researchers with an interdisciplinary and multi-cultural perspective, with record participation in Madrid 2019 with more than 130 proposals. My involvement in the past has been oriented to assist Teresa in the organization of activities and publications and specially the development of the Young scholar Ethics network with the assistance of Ben-Hur Deméneck and Hugo Sánchez: one of our main goals is to attract researchers in the first stages of their career. Other aims for the next years are:

  • To enlarge the community of researchers with a multicultural approach through conferences and publications 
  • To increase the delegation of academic tasks such as peer-review and proposals (already in practice) 
  • To reinforce the collaboration with other WG and Sections,
  • To pitch for funds for projects by the members 
  • To keep communication active and open along the year and 
  • To make our voice stronger whenever public issues related to Ethics and Communications is pertinent with the publication of posts and articles with the aid of a Public Affairs Committee, integrated by researchers elected by the WG members after Nairobi 2021.  

The two-year lapse from Madrid 2019 has been extremely challenging because of the mixture of goals as a result of the elections and acting in interim capacities. We need your support to be able to resume the previous work, stimulate research and make the most of our capacities. I therefore ask of you to support too María Teresa´s and Ben-Hur´s candidacies as Vice-Chairs, whose expertise, dedication and compromise are well-known by you.

Email: egarcia [at] uchceu.es

Kanchan K. Malik (University of Hyderabad, India)

Kanchan K. Malik is standing for the position of chair of the ‘Ethics of Society and Ethics of Communication Working Group’. She joins the candidacy for vice-chair of Esther Martínez Pastor and for vice-chair of Gilberto Alves Araújo.

Kanchan K. Malik is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad, India, where she was the Head from 2017-20. She is a Faculty Fellow with the UNESCO Chair on Community Media since 2011 and Editor of the newsletter – CR News. She is the vice-president of the Indian Association of Media & Communication Educators (IAMCE). Her research, publications, and teaching are in the areas of Community Media, Women in Community Communications, Journalism Studies, and Media Ethics. She has worked on the research “Religions, Ethics and Attitudes towards Corruption” as part of the Religions and Development project of the University of Birmingham. Her research contributed to policy advocacy efforts for community radio in India. She co-produced the Community Radio Continuous Improvement Toolkit (CR-CIT) based on codes of practice and non-negotiable ethical principles for community media. She was awarded the United States federal grant by the U.S. Consulate General, Hyderabad to develop an academic curriculum for Media Ethics in collaboration SUNY, Plattsburgh. She is co-author (with Prof. Vinod Pavarala) of the much-cited book Other Voices: The Struggle for Community Radio in India (Sage: 2007). Her recent co-edited book is titled, Community Radio in South Asia: Reclaiming the Airwaves (Routledge: 2020).

Email ID: drkanchan [at] uohyd.ac.in ; kanchank.malik [at] gmail.com

The objective as the chair would be to take forward the mission as envisioned by a group of members interested to improve the WG activities:

  1. to stimulate that the Group members work together not only during IAMCR conferences, but that they also develop common actions and interchanges over the year. For that, start an interactive Facebook community. 
  2. to establish more dialogue and productions between Ethics WG and Working Groups on Media Ethics of other communication researchers´ associations, as well as institutes and NGOs.
  3. to prepare panels dedicated to reflections on ethics, based on issues presented by the members.
  4. to organize more dialogue between the Group and other IAMCR Sections and Groups, resulting in publishing books and journal articles together.
  5. to ask the IAMCR Board to include issues around ethics in the plenary sessions during the conferences
  6. to make public consultations regarding the organization of the WG, the elaboration of Projects and application of possible financial resources from IAMCR to the initiatives
  7. to stimulate and strengthen the participation of emerging scholars and graduate students 
  8. to promote that Ethics Group members to evaluate the submitted abstracts
  9. to improve the visibility of the actions of the working group, using IAMCR channels like email, website and newsletter, taking into account the proposals sent, answering suggestions, and sending regular messages with call for papers and events.
  10. to organize or co-organize pre-conferences on Ethics and related issues next conferences

Gilberto Alves Araújo (The University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa & Universidade Federal do Pará, Brazil)

Gilberto Alves Araújo (South Africa/Brazil) is standing for the position of vice-chair of the ‘Ethics of Society and Ethics of Communication Working Group’. He joins the candidacy of other two brilliant scholars: Kanchan K. Malik (India), running for chair; and Esther Martínez Pastor (Spain), running for vice-chair.

Gilberto Alves Araújo has been working as a Lecturer and Researcher at the Universidade Federal do Pará, Brazil; and he is also a PhD Candidate at The University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Gilberto is a former Fulbright Scholar and has experience in the area of discourse studies, as illustrated by some of his last publications: The Hour of the Star through media lenses: a tribute to Clarice Lispector (2021); Black migrants in Brazilian and South African tabloids: Representations on the Global South (2020); Por uma literatura infantil e juvenil mais afrocêntrica (2020). Besides developing his current studies with discursive representations on black migrants in Brazilian and South African media, Gilberto has been working, since 2015, on several research projects concerning discourse analysis and language learning in the Amazon region. He is also one of the leading investigators at Redex-Xingu (2018-2022), a massive publicly-funded research project which aims at better understanding educational, cultural, environmental and socioeconomic effects of hydroelectric power plants on riverside communities alongside Xingu river. Lastly, he is also a member of UNEGRO (Union of Black People for Equality) and ABPN (Brazilian Association of Black Researchers).

Email ID: gaaraujo [at] ufpa.br; 1947169 [at] students.wits.ac.za

The objective as a vice-chair would be to take forward the mission as envisioned by a group of members interested to improve the WG activities:

  1. to stimulate that the Group members work together beyond IAMCR conferences, developing collaborative scientific work and exchanges consistently and regularly, resorting to social networking platforms such as Facebook, if needed be; 
  2. to establish and enhance interactions and collective works between the Ethics WG and Working Groups on Media Ethics of other communication researchers’ associations, institutes and NGOs;
  3. to democratically prioritize issues presented by the members of the WG when preparing panels dedicated to reflections on ethics;
  4. to organize more dialogue between the Group and other IAMCR Sections and Groups, resulting in publishing books and journal articles together;
  5. to advocate, before IAMCR board, for the inclusion of issues around ethics in the plenary sessions during the conferences;
  6. to make public consultations regarding the organization of the WG, the elaboration of projects and application of possible financial resources from IAMCR to the initiatives;
  7. to stimulate and strengthen the participation of emerging scholars and graduate students;
  8. to promote that Ethics Group members to evaluate the submitted abstracts;
  9. to improve the visibility of the actions of the working group, using IAMCR channels like email, website and newsletter, considering proposals sent, consistently answering suggestions, and sending regular messages with call for papers and events;
  10. to organize or co-organize pre-conferences on Ethics and related issues.

Ben-Hur Demeneck (Member of Journalism, Law and Freedom Research Group, ECA-USP, Brazil)

I am a member of the Journalism, Law and Freedom Research Group, linked to School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo (ECA-USP), and Institute for Advanced Studies of USP, Brazil, and I stand for the position of Vice-Chair of the Ethics of Society and Ethics of Communication Working Group, appointed by candidates Dr. Elvira García de Torres as Chair and Dr. María Teresa Nicolás Gavilán as Vice-Chair. The extraordinaire work by them, leading the WG in the past years, has been inspiring. As a young scholar, I have participated in IAMCR continuously since 2012 and as a member of the ETH WG I have supported all the activities organized by the WG in Conferences, pre and post Conferences. I was part of the Scientific Committee in the Pre-Conference Ethics & Communication in 2016 and also as active participant at the post-Conference in Barcelona 2019. The task I am most proud of, though, is being representative of the WG Young Scholars Ethics Network, along with Hugo Sánchez. In the first, in Madrid, young scholars from four continents answered our call. As part of the candidacy lead by Dr. García de Torres, I aim to devote my efforts primarily to attract researchers in the first stages of their career to the field of Ethics of Communication but also, to support the Chair and Vice Chair in other important goals such as:

  • To enlarge the community of researchers with a multicultural approach through conferences and publications
  • To increase the delegation of academic tasks such as peer-review and proposals (already in practice)
  • To reinforce the collaboration with other WG and Sections,
  • To pitch for funds for projects by the members
  • To keep communication active and open along the year and
  • To make our voice stronger whenever public issues related to Ethics and Communications is pertinent with the publication of posts and articles with the aid of a Public Affairs Committee, integrated by researchers elected by the WG members after Nairobi 2021.

I hold a PhD in Communication Sciences in School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo (ECA-USP), Brazil, and served as a collaborating professor in Journalism at the State University of Ponta Grossa starting in 2016. Master in Journalism in the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). In 2010, I received the Adelmo Genro Filho award from the Brazilian Association of Researchers in Journalism for the master´s thesis. Besides my academic achievements, I have been acting as ombudsman for two years in the newspaper RelevO, Curitiba (Brazil). Today, I collaborate as editor for Veneta publishing, in São Paulo. In 2020 I was selected with other 15 Latin American professional journalists by Beca Cosecha Anfibia, Argentina, to think about the challenges of journalism and its principles, with conferences by authors like Markus Gabriel and Vandana Shiva (publication forthcoming). It is my personal goal to reinforce the connection between scholars and practitioners.

Email: b.demeneck [at] gmail.com

Teresa Nicolás Gavilán (Universidad Panamericana, Mexico)

Dear colleagues,

I was first elected as Co-chair of Ethics of Society and Ethics of Communication with Prof. Manuel Parés, former IAMCR President and founder of the WG, who kindly invited me to co-chair the group. I took over from Professor Parés as he stepped down, with the compromise of continuing his work and transform the Working Group into a Section. With your support, we can finally fulfill his dream. For the past six years, as Chair of IAMCR´s ETH WG, I have promoted, with you support in different capacities and Elvira García de Torres´s help, the necessary activities to make this possible. Thanks to all of you we meet the requirements to become a section: the minimum number of sessions per year, peer review- with members of the WG acting also as reviewers-, plus all the additional activities and publications necessary for that purpose.

To step up the WG needs a team of Heads that share the main goals, expertise in the field and first-hand knowledge of IAMCR community of researchers in Ethics. And it is with confidence after years of common work and dedication that I endorse Elvira´s candidacy as Chair of the group. With your support, I will as Vice-chair, in collaboration with Ben-Hur Demeneck, devote my energy to the important tasks we have planned for the near future:

  • To finally become a Section, which is a very dear goal to me, given my personal and academic attachment to Dr. Manuel Parés.
  • Maintain the independence and essence of the WG and 
  • Give research in Ethics& Communication the status it deserves
  • Enlarge the community of researchers with a multicultural approach through conferences and publications
  • Increase the delegation of academic tasks such as peer-review and proposals (in practice)
  • Reinforce the collaboration with other WG and Sections,
  • Pitch for funds for projects by the members
  • Keep communication active and open along the year and
  • Make our voice stronger whenever public issues related to Ethics and Communications are pertinent with the publication of posts and articles

Along this period I have promoted pre (Montreal, 2015, Cartagena, 2017 and Leicester, 2016) and post-Conferences in 2019 with other WG and Sections. The Business Meetings have prompted team work collaboration with the WG members engaged to develop panel sessions and special panels in collaboration i.e. with the Media Sports section. The group's attraction for relevant researchers of the field is evident, with record participation in Madrid 2019 : more than 130 proposals from several continents, reflecting IAMCR mission, goals and diversity. We have promoted likewise collaboration with practitioners and ONGs such as Unesco, with the impulse of active members of the WG. After the twoyear lapse from Madrid 2019, acting in interim capacities, I ask for your support to this team to be able to complete the important tasks set for the 2021-2025 period. I kindly invite you to read our statements and support too Elvira´s and Ben-Hur´s candidacies as Chair and Vice-Chair.

Email: mnicolas [at] up.edu.mx

Esther Martínez Pastor (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)

I am an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Communication Sciences of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid and I am currently the Vice-Dean for Academic Organization and Curricula in the Faculty of Communication Sciences. My lines of research focus on Self-Regulatory and the regulation of advertising, advertising relating to children and transparency. I have a PhD in Advertising and Public Relations, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), and Bachelor’s Degree in Advertising and Public Relations (UCM) and in Law (UNED, the Spanish National Distance Education University).

I have written several articles on self-regulation and children such as “Entertainment or advertising? YouTube channels displaying content created by kids” (2021); The dilemmas of parental mediation: Continuities from parenting in general (Observatorio (OBS*, 2020); Overview of Complaints in Advertising and Minors in Self-Regulation (1998-2018) (Comunicación y Hombre , 2019); Public and Private Management of Toy Advertising: Regulation and Self-regulation in the European Union and Spain (Gestión y política pública,2017 ).

I am an expert in ethics, advertising and law on the jury of Autocontrol (which is a national advertising self-regulation body in Spain (which is a national advertising self-regulation body in Spain) in cases that had been claimed to be in breach of advertising self-regulation rules (2016-2019). The themes focused on numerous sectors and they also focused on different vulnerable target groups. And the issue was whether the advertisements were in breach of ethical self-regulatory codes.

I am currently leading the project carried out by the King Juan Carlos University with INCIBE and other entities SIC-SPAIN 2.0 "Safer Internet Centre Spain 2.0 Programme CEF-Telecom, Safer Internet call (CEFTC-2020-21). I am involved in research projects with the Foundation BBVA  (2020) conducting research “Families and children: the business of child Youtubers’ channels” (2020) as principal investigator; carry out different evaluations for Spanish Association of Toys elaborating an annual Report “Self-Regulatory Code for Television spots of toys and Children”(2009-2015) . 

Email: esther.martinez.pastor [at] urjc.es

Together with the candidacies of Prof. Kanchan K. Malik (candidate as chair), and Prof. Gilberto Alves Araújo (candidate as vice-chair) I plan:

  1. to stimulate that the Group members work together beyond IAMCR conferences, developing collaborative scientific work and exchanges consistently and regularly, resorting to social networking platforms such as Facebook, if needed be; 
  2. to establish and enhance interactions and collective works between the Ethics WG and Working Groups on Media Ethics of other communication researchers’ associations, institutes and NGOs;
  3. to democratically prioritize issues presented by the members of the WG when preparing panels dedicated to reflections on ethics;
  4. to organize more dialogue between the Group and other IAMCR Sections and Groups, resulting in publishing books and journal articles together;
  5. to advocate, before IAMCR board, for the inclusion of issues around ethics in the plenary sessions during the conferences;
  6. to make public consultations regarding the organization of the WG, the elaboration of projects and application of possible financial resources from IAMCR to the initiatives;
  7. to stimulate and strengthen the participation of emerging scholars and graduate students;
  8. to promote that Ethics Group members to evaluate the submitted abstracts;
  9. to improve the visibility of the actions of the working group, using IAMCR channels like email, website and newsletter, considering proposals sent, consistently answering suggestions, and sending regular messages with call for papers and events;
  10. to organize or co-organize pre-conferences on Ethics and related issues.

Sections and Working Groups