Biographies of Plenary Speakers
Kari Andén-Papadopoulos is Associate Professor at the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication, Stockholm university. Her main research interest concerns global visual culture, digital media and citizen journalism, with a specific focus on the role of visual images and practices in efforts to memorialize, interrogate, and at times create, the individual and collective experiences of war and crisis. Her work has been published in journals such as Media, Culture & Society, Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism, and Popular Communication: The International Journal of media and Communication. She is currently working on finishing a book titled Global Image Wars. Geopolitics and post-9/11 Visual Culture (Routledge, forthcoming). Responding to recent calls for a more empirical enquiry into the relationship between geopolitics and visual culture, the book uses case studies to take on fundamental questions about imaging, international politics, atrocity, memory, responsibility, and response in times of war and crises. By examining these issues through a series of key visual artefacts and practices in post-2001 global digital culture, it rethinks in more specific and empirical terms the role of new imaging technologies in the conduct – and critique – of geopolitics and the ways that they empower individual and collective acts of witnessing and remembrance.
Professor Stewart Clegg works as a Professor in leadership training, at the School of Management (Faculty of Business), in the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). Professor Clegg specialises in organisation and management theory, as well as in the research of power, social theory, and the elites. He has produced many books and scientific articles from the various fields of organizational studies, e.g. on the time of insecurity, which terrorism is causing to business. Professor Clegg is the Director of Innovative Collaborations Alliances and Networks (ICAN) research centre in Sydney. ICAN is a multidisciplinary research centre, offering training in research and organisation for the commercial, industrial, public and the third sector organizations. Stewart M. Clegg is also especially known for his research on network-like organisations. His most recent publication is the ‘Power of Organizations’ (2006, Sage), together with Nelson Phillips and David Courpasson. It has been appreciated particularly, because it brings together the traditional bureaucratic organisations and means of management, – as well as the ethno-methodological approaches rising from cultural study -, in understanding the human actions, also as a power struggle in all of the organized functions of the human beings.
Dave Cullen is a journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller Columbine, an indelible portrait of the killers, the victims, and the community that suffered one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century. He has contributed to the New York Times, Slate, Salon, Times of London, Washington Post and the Guardian. Cullen is considered a leading authority on the Columbine killers, and has also written extensively on Evangelical Christians, gays in the military, politics, and pop culture. A graduate of the MA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Cullen has won several writing awards, including a GLAAD Media Award, Society of Professional Journalism awards, the Jovanovich Imaginative Writing Award, and several Best of Salon citations. He is an Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Dave grew up in Chicago, and has worked in most regions of the U.S., as well as England, Kuwait and Bahrain.
Professor Douglas Kellner specialises on the philosophy of education. He holds the ‘George F. Kneller Philosophy of Education Chair’ and is the Director of Graduate School of Education and Information Studies in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Douglas Kellner has been working as a Professor at various Universities in the United States, as well as in Europe and Asia. He is the member of the editorial staff in a number of scholarly organisations and publications (e.g. ‘Theory, Culture and Society’, and ‘New Political Science’). Kellner’s research interest and expertise lie in media philosophy, media culture and in critical media education. He has produced over 20 publications and a vast collection of scientific articles in the fields of media, politics, culture and philosophy. His most recent (2008) work on media and violence is titled: ‘Guys and Guns Amok. Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklaholma City Bombing to the Virginia Tech Massacre.
Saku Mantere is acting professor of management and organization, Hanken School of Economics and Business Administration, and adjunct professor of organizational communications at the University of Helsinki. He studies strategy work in organizational centers and peripheries, being particularly interested in middle management agency and strategy discourse, as well as related issues such as the strategic management of organizational reputations. His work has been published in journals such as Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Journal of Management Studies and Strategic Organization.
Glenn Muschert is Associate Professor of Sociology at Miami University. Muschert’s areas of scholarly interest lie in the sociological study of crime and social problems, including the mass media framing of high profile crimes, school shootings, missing persons, and social control through surveillance technologies. His publications have appeared in American Behavioral Scientist, Critical Sociology, Sociological Inquiry, Justice Policy Journal, Sociological Imagination, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Annual Review of Law & Social Science, Sociology Compass, Social Science Journal, and Youth Violence & Juvenile Justice.
Ilmar Raag (born 21 May 1968 at Kuressaare) is an Estonian media executive, screenwriter and film director, best known for his socio-critical film The Class (Estonian: Klass). He has served as CEO of Estonian National Television (Estonian: Eesti Televisioon) from 2002 to 2005. He is well known columnist in many prestigious Estonian newspapers (Postimees,, Eesti Päevaleht). In recent years he has written many scripts and directed critically acclaimed films, notably August 1991 and The Class.
Professor Terhi Rantanen works as a Professor in Global Media and Communications in London School of Economics. Before joining LSE in January 2000 Rantanen held a full-time position as a senior academic in the Department of Communication at Helsinki University, where she also hold the position of Docent. Her books include e.g. When News Was New (Blackwell, 2009) The Media and Globalization (Sage, 2004), The Global and the National. Media and Communications in Post-Communist Russia (Rowman & Littlefield: 2002), The Globalization of News (with O. Boyd-Barrett, Sage: 1998). Her latest book is When News Was New (Blackwell, 2009). This book asks a simple question: ‘what makes news new?’. It investigates how news has re-invented itself at different historical moments – from medieval storytellers to 19th century telegraph news agencies to 21st century bloggers. Since the beginning of her career Rantanen has been doing research on global media organisations. Rantanen’s main object of interest has been news agencies, the first electronic media in the 19th century. Professor Rantanen is founding editor of a new journal Global Media and Communication.
Anna Roosvall is Postdoctoral Fellow in Media and Communications Studies at the School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences at Örebro University, Sweden, where she runs her postdoctoral research project ”Nation and Globalization in Foreign News. Culture and Politics in the International News Picture Circuit” (2008-2013) and is in charge of the Global Journalism Program. She takes part in the international research projects The Conflict in Caucasus in Journalism, and MediaClimate. She is also involved in Nordic research networks on Media and Religion, Visual Studies and Journalism Research. She is currently finishing the edited volume Communicating the Nation (co-edited with Inka Salovaara-Moring, to be published by Nordicom) and her recent publications include ”Global Divides in Cosmographic Genres. Charity, Solidarity and Different Explanation of Difference” (Nordicom Review, 2009) and ”We Witness the World. National and Cosmopolitan Memories in Documentaries about Foreign Nations” (in Castelló, E., Dhoest, A. and O’Donnell, H. eds., The Nation on Screen. Discourses of the National on Global Television, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).
Professor Barbie Zelizer holds the ‘Raymond Williams Chair of Communication’, and is the Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication, at the Annenberg School for Communication, in the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the co-editor and founder of the scholarly journal ‘Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism (Sage)’. Currently, Zelizer is the President-Elect-Select of the International Communication Association (ICA). Zelizer’s work focuses on the cultural dimensions of journalism, with a specific interest in journalistic authority, collective memory, and journalistic images in times of crisis and war. Author and editor of eight books and some 50 book chapters and articles in the world-renowned scientific journals and publications, Zelizer’s work has been translated into French, Hebrew, German, Portuguese, Romanian and Japanese. Zelizer is currently working on finishing a book-length manuscript on how images of impending death have been used to depict controversial events in the news (“About to Die”: How News Images Move the Public. University of Chicago Press, in preparation). Other current projects also include finishing a co-authored manuscript with Stuart Allan on keywords in journalism (Keywords in Journalism and Media Studies. Open University Press, in preparation).
Performer
Contemporary artist; Stephen Pratt BA
Stephen Pratt was born in 1949 in the north of England. He attended a number of strict boarding schools before being enlisted into the army as a Junior Leader at the age of 14 ½ years.
Stephen still finds it difficult to reconcile with his 17 years military career – as a period of “service to a false ideology”. This is reflected in his ‘Military Conflict Paintings and Objects’ of the nineties, and his more recent engagement as series of works entitled; Military Conflict (1992 – ongoing); Conflicts of Place (2005 ongoing); Victims (2009 ongoing).
Stephen Pratt first began to study art through various adult education institutes in Leeds in the mid 1980’s. In 1996 he graduated from the University of Leeds with a First Class Honours degree in Fine Art. He was awarded the Alun Mohun Memorial Prize for painting.
“I have always had this need to place myself into impossible situations and then find a way out. It even happens today, when I go out into the forest or wilderness. I tempt providence at every turn and use my training to extricate myself – its the only time I actually feel ‘in control’. And in art I use that same element of risk to see how it plays into the work.
After a short foray into the ‘art scene’ in the UK, the artist relocated to northern Finland. The move to Finland was an attempt to place some distance between the public and private effects of being a former SAS soldier with the need to rediscover and assign meaning to certain violent events of past and present.
For Stephen Pratt, the Jokela shooting in Finland was a massive wake up call that the problem of murder suicide is now in society and that we must try and unlock these models of violent behaviour so that we are better equipped to demystify their causes and thus help to prevent those models from taking hold.
Recently, the artist has started to combine his written texts with live and video recorded monologue performances as part of a new series of works entitled ‘Deconstructing Models of Violent Interruption’ (2009 – ongoing).