Restoring Civic Health in a Culture of Distance: Media and the Challenge of Proximal Belonging

We live in a culture of distance. In our homes, in our schools, in our places of work, and in our public spaces, we’ve inserted technologies to cultivate distance between us and those people, places and ideas around us. We’ve normalised distance as a natural outcome of our mediated lifestyles. Our technologies connect us to information, to ideas, and to people, albeit outside of our immediate proximity and removed from our physical communities. This type of distance is subtle but cumulative. It refers to the losses accrued from replacing the everyday human movements and signals that we negotiate with the glow of screens. This talk will explore the problem of distance in our digital lives and focus on how we can move to restore civic health through prioritizing restorative principles of proximity, care and agency. 

Speaker bio

Paul Mihailidis is a professor of civic media and journalism and Special Advisor to the provost at Emerson College in Boston. He is founding program director of the MA in Media Design, and faculty chair and director of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change. Dr Mihailidis's academic interests in civic media and community engagement are closely connected to his leadership work in higher education. As a scholar with an established research record, Dr Mihailidis has collaborated across disciplines to explore how civic media interventions can support inclusive, just, and equitable futures. He has consulted around the world on news and media literacies as tools for civic empowerment and meaningful engagement in communities. Paul is the author of Civic Media Literacies: Re-Imagining Human Connection in an Age of Digital Abundance (Routledge 2019).

Paul is visiting Australia as an adviser to the Addressing Misinformation with Media Literacy project at Western Sydney University.