Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 47
ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Accessibility is a right that we should fight for and we should ensure that all people have
an opportunity to gather information from a variety of sources. However, it is exactly
this variety of resources that we need to address and that should be at the heart of media
literacy education. I believe that being correctly informed/having a sound and reliable
knowledge base is key for whatever you do.
Conclusion
Even being from a different generation, not being a digital native, and only having had
limited experiences concerning (im)migration, there are things we as educators can do:
1) Be aware of the danger of the single story. The Nigerian author Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie, in her amazing Ted talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/chimam
anda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story), brings this to the point. We are
accomplices to the single story that is told in European/western arts management
courses. It is almost entirely a western story. We need to give students an
opportunity to experience other narratives, methodologies, and epistemologies.
This requires that we actively seek partners in countries and regions that have
been marginalized in our discourses for too long (Henze 2019), which is not an
easy task (Durrer and Henze 2018, 3). We need more literature from authors
outside the western hemisphere. This requires more effort and money for translations.
Free online translation tools like Deepl can have a huge impact and put
artificial intelligence to good use.
2) Talk to people involved. This is only possible when you have a network�and
this would lead me on another journey on the importance of networks in cultural
management on which I am most happy to embark in another text. However,
contacting people from the respective regions is important when we strive to
overcome our ethnocentric frames of reference (Henze 2019). Networks like
Brokering Intercultural Exchange (www.managingculture.net), which are not
only open for researchers, but also for students and Ph.D. candidates, can help
overcome the dependency on unreliable media resources by providing reliable
contacts and forums to gather and exchange personally and virtually.
3) Train students to constantly question the information they receive. There is
an enormous amount of literature on propaganda. Do we make use of this in
arts management education? Do our students know the propaganda model by
Chomsky? I think they should.
4) We need more open access resources like this journal. The “publish or perish”
doctrine in academia makes us accept standards that we would not necessarily
accept in any other area of life. Making more texts available to the public via
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