VIRTUAL SYMPOSIUM

to transcript of the symposium

Participants:

Mary E. Beadle is an associate professor of communications at John Carroll University located near Cleveland, Ohio. She teaches in the undergraduate communications program and in the graduate program in communications management. Her research interests include international media and media history. She has completed several research projects in South America and has conducted communication seminars in Russia, Paraguay and Argentina. She currently serves as vice-chair of the International Division of the Broadcast Education Association.

Mauro Porto is assistant professor of the Department of International Relations of the University of Brasilia, Brazil. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego. His main field of research is political communication, particularly the role of television in Brazilian politics, and he has written several articles about the relationship between mass media, politics and democracy. His Ph.D. dissertation will discuss the links between television and its audiences' interpretation of the political process in Brazil.

Joseph Straubhaar is Amon G. Carter Centennial Professor of Communication, Department of Radio-TV-Film at The University of Texas at Austin. He has published a book on international communications, “Videocassette Recorders in the Third World”; edited a book on international telecommunications, “Telecommunications Politics: Ownership and Control of the Information Superhighway in Developing Countries”; and written a textbook, “Media Now: Communications Media in the Information Society”; along with numerous articles and essays on Brazilian television, Latin American media, comparative analyses of new television technologies, media flow and culture, and other topics appearing in a number of journals, edited books, and elsewhere. He does research in Latin America, Asia and Africa, and has taken student groups to Latin America and Asia. He has done seminars abroad on media research, television programming strategies, and telecommunications privatization.

Gaetan Tremblay is a professor of communications at the University of Quebec at Montreal. Concentrating on audio-visual industries and communication networks, Professor Tremblay employs a comparative analytical approach to assess the impact of new technologies on the cultural policies of various communities, including Quebec, Belgium, Spain, France, Brazil and Mexico. He is interested in the question of making cultural policies effective in a rapidly changing technological world. His current research focuses on the complex inter-relationship between technological change, the effects of international trade agreements such as NAFTA, Mercosur, and the European Union, and national policies designed to protect and foster unique cultural attributes. He has been invited as a guest lecturer in more than twenty universities in different countries. He also has published several books and many papers in various academic journals.