Message from the Director
A ten year anniversary is a moment to take stock of the past and look toward the future.
Our stock-in-trade consists of academic degrees and units. In the MA in International Communication by coursework, we have over the years developed an exciting array of units clustered under the following rubrics:
Theory: Technology & Society
Theory: People & Messages
Media Skills
Public Relations Theory & Skills
Research Theory & Practice
The PhD in International Communication has been awarded for theses with the following titles:
The Dimensions of Cultural Change, Identity, Space and Transnational Television in India. (Dr Stephen McElhinney/Australia);
Evaluation of the Quality of Teaching in the Communication Sciences Department of Asuncion's Catholic University in Terms of the Requirements of Education Principles (Dr Diosnel Centurion/Paraguay);
The Impact of the New Communication Technologies on Thai Educational Values.
(Dr Kanchana Chokriensukchai/Thailand);
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Educational Campaigns in China – an innovation diffusion perspective.
(Dr Guo Qin/China);
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Globalisation of Film and Television: A Comparison of the Preferences of Australian and Thai Adolescents (Dr Stephen McElhinney/Australia);
Absorbers, Users and Abusers of Official Chinese Television (Dr Yong Zhong/Australia).
In addition to the large Sydney Program, an offshore offering of the MA in International Communication will be made available shortly in Hong Kong and thereafter some units leading to the MA will be offered in Beijing.
Principals of area schools present at the 10 Year Anniversary event will be interested to learn of the new Bachelor of International Communication that will be offered in 2002.
IC supports the publication of The Journal of International Communication (JIC). Since its launch in 1994 in Seoul, Republic of Korea, JIC has published special issues on International Feminism(s), Development, Media & Foreign Policy, Political Economy, Human Rights and Olympic Communication. The Participatory Communication issue is being launched at the 10 Year Anniversary event and a Cross-Cultural Communication issue is underway.
IC research students helped organise an international conference, "Re-visioning the Future", in 1999. Papers presented at that conference, several by IC research students will appear as chapters in Mapping Globalisation along with chapters by international scholars. IC research students are helping to organise an international conference on "Media and Communication Research in the Age of Globalisation" for the IC initiative, the Under-Represented Areas Network for Media and Communication Research.
Close to 400 students have passed through our portals since 1991, 100 being from Australia and 300 hailing from countries as far apart as Liechtenstein and New Caledonia, Paraguay and Morocco, China and Zaire, Papua New Guinea and Norway, Germany and Thailand.
We have a listserv for our students, shared by alumni and current students, and we try to keep in touch with them after they have left us. IC graduates have gone into careers in Public Relations, Media, Diplomacy and Academia, among other areas.
Our multicultural staff members are drawn from industry and academia. Among our midst are two former senior broadcasters (one being a former member of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal), a former Australian Ambassador to the United Nations, a former policy analyst from the Department of Communications, a senior journalist, a television station manager as well as academics.
I would like to place on record my thanks to our students and staff, past and present, the University Executive, the Division of Society, Culture, Media & Philosophy and the former School of English, Linguistics and Media for contributing to IC's development in the past decade.
Associate Professor Naren Chitty
Director, Department of International Communication