Welcome to the Ørecomm Festival!

The Ørecomm Festival is taking place at a moment in time where we are experiencing civic engagement, or ‘agency’ to a degree that is historical. First and foremost we are witnessing massive social mobilization in the Arab world, where governments have been overthrown, but large demonstrations have equally struck Greece and Spain, as well as Chile, Malawi and Israel. A common denominator is the use of social media, both in the mobilization process and in the documenting the same process and making it known to the world.

However, while it is easy to be mesmerized by the role of the new media in the processes of social change, we should be aware that the motivating force behind the upheavals is dissatisfaction and frustration over the underlying realities of poverty, unemployment, and subdued human rights. The development challenges, the exclusion of many people from development processes, lie at the heart of what is happening in the world right now. Recent events, in London and Norway, have also made it adamantly clear that the new communication power can be used for destructive purposes as well.

It is in this complex context that we have formulated our festival theme: Agency in the Mediatized World – Media, Communication and Development in Transition.

Over five full days, in three cities, on both sides of the Øresund strait, more than two hundred students, researchers, consultants, practitioners, journalists and representatives from bilateral and multilateral agencies, are coming together to discuss the different aspects of this over-all theme. Many of you will be present physically, but we have equally many participants online, and we are looking forward to a truly global interaction.

The festival is actually a fusion of three events. Firstly, the ComDev master program at Malmö University is running one of its regular three-day seminars as part of the festival. Secondly, the Glocal NOMAD (Network on Media and Development) is holding a conference that concludes the festival. Glocal NOMAD has over the past two years developed a network of scholars and practitioners interested in media and development – the core network is constituted by scholars at the universities of Roskilde, Århus and Malmö, but many others have participated in our seminars. Finally, and primarily, this festival is the first of its kind to be organized by Ørecomm. Ørecomm is a transnational research platform hosted by Roskilde University in Denmark and Malmö University in Sweden. We launched ourselves three years ago as an informal network. Our main ambition was, and continues to be, to promote research in the field of media, culture and development. In that process, we wish to link our strengthened research community to the vibrant practitioner environment in the Øresund region and inspire interesting collaborative teaching across our institutions and within our growing global network.

Thanks to an EU-Interreg grant, we have been able to bring this inaugural festival to this grand scale. Our ambition is to organize one Ørecomm Festival each year, in addition to our continuing series of open seminars and other events.

We are confident that you will have a good time!

Oscar Hemer and Thomas Tufte
Co-directors of Ørecomm