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| Photo by Jonathan Hiskes |
| Leen d’Haenens, a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, spoke about the media usage of migrant families in the Netherlands and Northern Belgium. |
Co-sponsored by the School of Journalism and the West European Studies program, the daylong conference drew international scholars who spoke about a diverse body of research. Students in professor Christine Ogan’s J514 International Communications class, who had read work by the visiting speakers, participated in the discussions.
“It’s been a great way to sort of put faces on the research we’ve been reading,” graduate student William Saint said. “We’ve been inundated with fascinating research, and now we get to ask the researchers questions and have them respond.”
Marwan Kraidy of the University of Pennsylvania spoke about an Arabic reality TV show’s reception in Saudi Arabia. The show, produced by the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, confronted issues that aren’t discussed in the country’s state-controlled media, he said.
“Saudi perceptions are not studied very well because it’s a closed culture and there’s not much dialogue,” graduate student January Jones said. “(Kraidy) looked at whether reality TV is actually good for popular culture there.”
Kraidy spoke of his difficulty conducting research from outside Saudi Arabia because of government restrictions, Jones said.
Leen d’Haenens, a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, spoke about the media usage of migrant families in the Netherlands and Northern Belgium.
“They’re very critical of what they read,” she said of the Turkish and Moroccan youth she has surveyed in her ongoing research. “They recognize too little of themselves in the Dutch media. There’s a big mismatch between what they want from the media and what they receive.”
D’Haenens studies the ways migrant families rely on the media of both their home and their host countries. In general, as individuals rise in education and socioeconomic level, they rely less on news from their “native” country and more on their current country’s media, she said. She also learned that television news is far more popular among Moroccan and Turkish youth than among their Dutch and Belgian counterparts, who have been quicker to move from TV to the Web.
But watching TV “is still more of a communal activity” for migrant families, she said. “It’s not so individualized yet.”
West European Studies graduate student Tristan Reitz asked whether minority groups were able to produce their own media in the Netherlands and Belgium. D’Haenens said the cost of TV has so far prevented minority groups from having their own channels.
She said the Dutch media should make more of this opportunity.
“The potential for mainstream newspapers in the Netherlands and Flanders (in northern Belgium) to reach them is very high,” she said, in particular mentioning the Turkish youth who perceived Dutch media as biased.
“Reliable content is a key motivator for getting the news in Dutch,” she said. “For journalists, it’s very important to see that.”
She mentioned the political struggles in the region over migration and immigration and said she hoped her work led to understanding of overlooked minority groups.
“It’s really the motivation of such large-scale data collection that is missing that motivates you to do this research,” she said.
The conference also featured a panel session and a talk by Deniz Gokturk of the University of California-Berkeley German Department on "Sound Bridges and Traveling Tunes: Transnational Mobility as Ironic Melodrama."
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