The
U.S. State Department announced in April that it will sponsor 10-week
virtual student exchange programs to connect teens from the United
States, Bahrain, Israel, and the UAE to collaborate in developing
"social impact video games." "Game Exchange" is part of a State
Department grant award to Games for Change,
a Woodside, N.Y.-based nonprofit that, by its own description,
"empowers game creators and social innovators to drive real-world impact
through games and immersive media." Game Exchange aims to reach 3,000
middle and high school students over two years by pairing classrooms
across borders. I am a believer in "sports diplomacy" by the State Department and in the related work of organizations such as Soccer Without Borders, so I guess I should get behind this STEM equivalent. Read more at Games for Change or at The Washington Post(bafflingly not pay-walled at last check). Hat tip to Jennifer Batista at IP Media Law and Updates from New York City-based Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz.
They gave me the latitude to talk about my nascent theoretical framework for analyzing legal responses to the problem of media misinformation / disinformation —colloquially if ambiguously termed "fake news," or unambiguously, as I prefer, in Spanish, desinformación. My rubric ranges from non-responses, what I call "the Wild West" approach, to authoritarian responses.
The best of the conference of course came from what I was able to learn from my colleagues of such far-ranging experiences, backgrounds, and focuses of study. I'll comment on some photographic highlights here, though this testimony will not express how deeply this program enriched my experience in comparativism.
Top paper honors went to Abdulla Saad of Amity Dubai. I was fortunate to serve as a judge on his panel, and his presentation was a favorite of mine. A mass communication scholar and proclaimed leading world expert on karak chai, Abdulla is researching online humor in the face of the gravest of circumstances, such as oppression and war.
Interdisciplinary presenters brought perspective to problems in mass communication. Social media researchers Fathima Linsha Basheer and Sudha Bhattia are considering the implications of this factoid: ten minutes' tweeting yields 13% oxytocin increase in brain. Oxytocin is also known as "the love hormone."
"Dr. G.," Dr. Geentanjali Chandra, is the head of the law school at Amity Dubai. Amity Dubai is the only school outside of India accredited to allow its graduates to sit for the bar in India.
Dr. G. kindly invited me to talk to a law class. Students studying at Amity Dubai are surprisingly diverse. The UAE creates a curious dynamic: Indian migrants--already an intrinsically diverse population--make up some quarter of the population of the Emirates and have established multi-generational households. Yet they remain Indian citizens. As a result, the young generation has a unique global identity.
Amity Dubai studded the scholarly program with creative contributions from the range of student talents fostered at the university, including fashion, dance, and film. Film students spent just one week creating a short-film horror project titled, "Out of Order." I'm getting in the ground floor as a fan of up-and-coming director Ruslan Baiazov.
