This year we celebrate the sixth POLIS Summer School: International Journalism and Society – The Role of the Media In The Modern World. Amazing things have happened in global news media recently and this course has been revamped to reflect those changes. With its international students it also reflects the diversity of people’s experience of media.
The three weeks pack in 12 lectures and seminars by myself with senior lecturers from the Department of Media and Communications. But we also have a dozen top practitioners who tell us about their frontline work in reporting, website design, humanitarian communications, blogging, online activism, TV, radio and writing.
In the seminars we mix up heated debate about the politics, ethics and practicalities of modern media with some revealing and challenging exercises.
You can get a flavour of the course by clicking on the ‘guest-blogger’ or ‘summer school’ categories on this blog. There are articles by some of the students and even versions of the exam answers or essays they wrote while here.
You will see that we take on the big questions: what is globalisation? how does media change politics? what is different about new media? Can journalism be objective? What are the limits on free speech? We also try to keep it as topical as possible, so this year we will be looking at what has happened in the Middle East, the Occupy protests and there will be one lecture on WikiLeaks.
The students are very mixed too. They come from all around the world (and the UK!). Some are media students and for many of them the course will earn them credits. Some are working journalists while others may have jobs in government or with NGOs or governments. Anyone interested in international journalism is welcome.
So if you want a cracking three weeks this summer in the heart of the one of the world’s most important media centres, then have a look at the Summer School website.
Who knows, you might be one of the students who decides to go on and study journalism here at the LSE as a post-graduate.
