whew! what a semester!

it took me a while to blog. this past semester was difficult. i took nine hours and taught two classes. i will do the same thing in the spring. but busting butt now means finishing course work by next fall. i'm anxious to get to the PhD.

for those of you who have perused my blog, it should be evident that i've been interested in kosovo. it actually became the focal point of my fall semester projects. in my development communications class, i worked on what i hope is a good start to a case study exploring how the regulatory and legislative framework promulgated by the UN mission in kosovo facilitated what has become Kosovar Albanians' opportunity to create their own media. this exploration was remarkable for many reasons. first, many of these documents - at least created by Kosovo's provisional government - are available online. second, in flipping through each of the documents, spread out across my floor by date or by agency or some other descriptor that i used in my haphazard filing system, i saw the creation of what many in the tiny province hope will be a country. i make no predictions about what will happen, only to reiterate what i put forth when i spoke with my poli sci professor. i don't think serbia will let the province go easily. and i don't think kosovo will stay easily. this tiny patch of earth should be kept in mind because it signifies an even larger tension between the united states and russia. sometimes i think following some of these events and speculating on what could happen is actually much more fun than watching television.

speaking of television: i'm almost finished with neil postman's "amusing ourselves to death." i highly recommend it.

my second project - for my international relations class - also focused on kosovo. but i took a much different angle. some have indicated that the un took steps in kosovo and east timor that it hadn't taken previously. while it had helped governments rebuild - for instance in cambodia - it didn't actually take over governance as it had in kosovo and east timor. because i think that the american news media help us organize our understanding of the world, i felt a change in un action such as this should be studied, especially how it appeared in the american news media. i struggled with the project to a certain degree. i was in a political science class, and their research methods vary from those used in media research. in the end, i came up with a framing analysis. i would divulge more, but i plan to submit the project to a symposium. i will write more about how it turns out. i am excited about the project, as i really like framing as a theoretical tool. while it isn't all-encompassing, i challenge researchers to find a theoretical tool that is. but i think it offers ways of exploring phenomena that sometimes cannot be explored in other ways.

school is about a week away, and i'm still working diligently with preparing for the courses that i will teach. i hope to contact michael wesch who teaches at kansas state university. he has used some of these web 2.0 tools in remarkable ways, and i'm interested in using these tools not only in the classroom but in my research, as well. i would be interested to hear from journalists globally about different issues, especially information flows; i hope some of these tools could facilitate that. i know few probably consider information flows a viable research consideration any more but i think it's especially pertinent now.

this semester, i'm taking a geography course that will focus on development in the third world, an international news communications course, and media globalization course. i'm really excited about what i will learn and even more excited what research questions i will discover. is anybody else wondering about how we evaluate information now? a brief vignette to illustrate a point before i close down for the evening.

my aunt, whom i love dearly, came to visit twice while i was at home - my original home is oklahoma, my diasporal home is phl - and we gathered around the kitchen table as we talked. my father, mother, aunt, cousin, and i warmly talked about the world and its state of affairs. on her second visit, because each visit she came with different cousins, she made the comment that she didn't know what had happened to the world. the value of human life everywhere seemed to be in decline. and i'm not sure if i said this aloud or only thought this, but it occurred that when she grew up she didn't have the rapid flow of violent images that she probably sees today, nor was the symbolic environment of her youth shaped the way it is today. i made the point, though i think it was lost on my more conservative elders, that we now have access to other sources of information; when i say other sources, i mean of course sources of information from other nations. i wonder how we would evaluate this information. probably, given my company, with skepticism. many studies indicate the flow of images and news content into the united states show "the other" as an exotic place, a violent, unwieldy place that exists in stark contrast to our comfortable, american lives. in other studies, political content is often painted with a nationalistic brush despite which side of the political continuum the news media may reside. what happens when we have access to news sources from beyond our national borders? how do we evaluate that information? would my aunt's world seem so violent? maybe. maybe not. i've lived in philly for the better part of a year and a half, and i have yet to see a drive-by despite the persistent news items in local media about the violence that pervades the city.