How does the media shape political change? How have journalists both challenged and offered cover for authoritarian regimes? Questions like these have been brought to the fore in recent years by the “Arab Spring” that has rocked authoritarian and military-dominated regimes across the Middle East, in which both professional and “citizen” journalists have played key roles. These same questions arose again and again in Latin America in the 1980s, where the late twentieth century’s great wave of global democratization began. This interdisciplinary, transregional research conference, featuring pre-circulated papers, will bring together scholars who study print, broadcast, and digital media in Latin America, in order to think critically about the relationships between media cultures and political change in Latin America and to develop innovative tools to for scholars to more critically interpret media sources in historical research.

2013 conference: Heroes or Hacks? | Media Cultures, Politics, and Democracy in Latin America

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