Cluster facilitator Mikkel Flyverbom gave presentation at an expert workshop in Washington
Cluster facilitator Mikkel Flyverbom gave presentation at an expert workshop in Washington
Ealier this fall cluster facilitator at the Internet Business and Society cluster and associate professor Mikkel Flyverbom gave a presentation at the by-invitation expert workshop ‘The Role of Advocacy in Media and Telecom Policy’ held in Washington Sept. 29 – Oct.1, 2013.
The presentation, entitled “Internet Policy by Numbers – Corporate Advocacy in the Internet Domain” got response by Benjamin Lennet from the New America Foundation.
Generally the workshop shed light on the role of advocacy in the formation of media and telecom policy and ways of study the engagement of advocates in policy change.Scholars have studied the work of media policy advocates analyzing their framing practices, mobilizing strategies, and how they create (or hinder) political opportunities for policy reform.There seems to be a growing need to study the structural, cultural, and cognitive factors that shape the work of media policy advocates, the processes by which they build capacities, and the impacts of their work on the policies they try to shape, and on inclusive and democratic media governance structures.
At the workshop participants amongst others discussed the following:
- Should media and telecom policy advocacy be seen as central to the “laboring of communication” (Mosco & McKerger, 2008), a critical form of knowledge work that seeks to redraw the material, symbolic, and normative boundaries defining media fields and practices, or are they merely another “pressure group” whose impact needs to be evaluated in the analysis of the policy process?
- Does policy advocacy labor serve only a taken-for-granted conception about the policy process or does it challenge and change such conceptualizations?
- Can the notion of policy advocacy work refocus attention on institutional pressures faced by advocates and researchers of media and telecom policy?
Mikkel Flyverbom is associate professor and PhD at CBS. Furtheremore he holds the position as cluster facilitator at the CBS Public-Private Platform cluster Internet, Business and Society. Read more about his work here.