Dwayne Winseck is in the running for the board of directors of the National Press Club of Canada Foundation.  The election will be held tomorrow night at the group’s annual general meeting.

He says gaining a seat would provide “a wonderful opportunity to be amongst a distinguished group of people working hard and heavy at grappling with the changes taking place across the journalistic and media landscape.”

Among areas he would like to focus on are copyright and news sharing, media industry consolidation, strategic communications and spin, and “how digital dimes and online readership can make up for lost dollars and real journalistic jobs in the emergent ‘network public sphere’.”

On another front, Dwayne returned from New Zealand recently.  He gave a lecture at Otago University and presented a keynote address on the political economies of media to the Journalism Media and Democracy Conference held at the Auckland University of Technology.

“They asked me to write about the media, telecom and Internet industries in Canada,” he says.  “Obviously, I’m delighted to have had my blog plucked out of obscurity and thrust into the national limelight.”

The debut article was on current efforts to regulate film and television programs, delivered over the Internet by the likes of Netflix, as broadcasters in Canada. He’s also written about bandwidth caps and the consortium that governed the federal election debates.

A link to the columns to date can be found at www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/digital-culture/dwayne-winseck/.

Harper’s death stare all about connecting

Stephen Harper was looking at you last night.

The Conservative leader stared straight into the camera – and into your eyes – as he largely ignored his political rivals and spoke directly to voters during both installments of the televised debates.

Call it effective. Call it creepy. Call it a steady gaze. Call it a death stare.

Call it whatever you want, but the man who wants to return as prime minister was clearly coached to stay above the fray as he listed his economic achievements, shrugged off a contempt finding and urged voters to grant him a majority government.

The Conservative national campaign chairman hinted at this strategy before the debates, telling the Star the party viewed the events as an opportunity to address voters directly.

“A debate is not about what one candidate says to another,” said Guy Giorno. “A debate is about what you say to people who are watching.”

That should have been a clue, but while it was expected that Harper would try to avoid any passionate one-on-one sparring, it surprised many observers that the advice to speak directly to Canadians was meant to be taken so literally.

Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe obviously noticed, and dared Harper to do things differently for the Frenchlanguage debate Wednesday night.

“I hope you will have the decency to look me in the eye when you respond to me,” said a post on the Twitter account for Duceppe ahead of the debate, although Harper did not change a thing.

Josh Greenberg, an associate communications professor at Carleton University, found the technique effective.

“Knowing he’d face three skilled debaters looking to knock him off balance, ‘Angry Steve’ didn’t come out to play -instead, we saw a PM who remained calm and composed, who never got rattled, never broke a sweat and whose tone of voice remained even throughout the debate,” Greenberg wrote in a blog post Wednesday morning, recapping the language debate . “Harper knew precisely where his camera was located and effectively spoke to it, and thus directly to
Canadians watching at home.”

Elly Alboim, an associate professor of journalism at Carleton University and former parliamentary bureau chief for CBC-TV, said establishing eye contact with the audience shows concern, but avoiding eye contact with the others in the conversation can be tricky.
“It’s a delicate balance,” Alboim said. “Looking exclusively at the camera and not at the people you are debating … creates a kind of weird tension between the two potential audiences and what seems to be appropriate behaviour.”

Alboim said Harper probably achieved what he wanted.

“I think it’s effective,” Alboim said. “I think an audience tends not to notice these things on a technical level, but they certainly have a different reaction to someone appearing to speak to the directly and watching two people talk in conversation.”

Communications consultant Barry McLoughlin said he would normally advise clients to begin by addressing the questioner and then turn to the camera, but he thought the camera-only method served Harper well on Wednesday.

“It kept him focused and kept him in the tone of voice that he wanted to adopt – a balanced and a calm tone of voice.”

Chris Tse has a winning way with words. Literally. He’s Canada’s slam poetry champion and next month, when he competes in an international competition in Paris, he could capture the world crown.

Not bad for a guy whose mom had to encourage him to enter poetry competitions in high school in Coquitlam, B.C. “She’d enter, I’d win,” he jokes.

“I could always flat-out write, and that’s how I could B.S. my way through everything,” he adds. “I wasn’t a strong student, but writing was how I got the grades to get into Carleton.” He’s wrapping up his fourth year in the Bachelor of Journalism program.

Soon after he arrived in Ottawa, he caught a performance by Shane Koyczan, a slam poet he’d learned about through MySpace. “I liked his work, but didn’t know what it was,” Chris recalls. “I didn’t know how to define it, but I thought it was cool.” Opening were members of the local group, Capital Slam, and Chris was hooked. He wrote a couple of poems, performed at the next Capital Slam competition, and took second place.

Last year was a banner year, when he became Ottawa champion and captained Capital Slam to the national championship.

Since then he has taught slam poetry at high schools in Ottawa and B.C. and talked to kids at TEDx events, and will perform next month at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Arts Centre.

But his fame has spread internationally – and he almost didn’t know why. At a Vancouver slam in December 2009, he performed a controversial work called “I’m Sorry I’m a Christian.” It went online a couple of weeks later, but nobody told him.

“All of a sudden I got random requests to be a Facebook friend or Twitter follower, and I finally asked somebody why. He said, ‘Dude, you don’t know? You’re all over YouTube.’” With more than 80,000 views to date, the poem has caused a stir among atheists and Christians alike, is blogged about by right- and left-wing religious leaders, received air time on two Australian radio shows, and led to speaking invitations from both church and hip-hop events throughout the U.S.

“I don’t even think it’s my best piece,” he says.

But it does reflect another side of Chris Tse: his faith. He serves on the leadership team of the campus chapter of Navigators, an international group that explores Christian beliefs from a social justice perspective. “When you make a decision to believe, you’re not set for life. It’s a constant struggle.”

He helps promote club events, volunteers at the Ottawa Mission and Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, and interned one summer as a youth director at a church.

He also spent four years with Journalists for Human Rights (JHR), a group that mobilizes the media to make people aware of their human rights, and this year was president of the local chapter – though he says, “That’s really just a title since the executive works together.” He’s off to Ghana this summer to work at a radio station on a government-funded JHR project.

But he’ll take a break from that for the world slam poetry championship in Paris. He says he’s pretty competitive – after all, he was a provincial-level athlete in track and field. But win or lose, he says, every performance is “an opportunity to get on stage and be fully uncensored for 3 minutes and 10 seconds. You can say the most radical things, and people give you respect.”

Hard on the heels of every federal election comes a volume edited by Carleton faculty, marshalling the research and insights of several academic political observers. A collaborative effort between the School and Carleton’s political science department, the latest volume in the election analysis series, like four previous anthologies, is being edited by Chris Dornan and political scientist Jon Pammett.

Contributors from the School of Journalism and Communication include Susan Harada on the Green Party campaign; André Turcotte on polling; Chris Waddell and Mary Francoli on digital media; and editor Dornan on the overall campaign. Other contributors hail from Concordia, University of Saskatchewan, McGill, Memorial, Waterloo and the University of Toronto.

On the day the government fell, meanwhile, Chris Dornan found himself moderating a discussion among Jodi White, BJ’70, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Kim Campbell; Edward (Eddie) Goldenberg, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien; and Keith Beardsley, former deputy chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The event, “Inside the Prime Minister’s Office,” was organized by Carleton professor Jonathan Malloy, president of the Canadian Study of Parliament Group.

Dozens of past participants in the project have confirmed they plan to attend the event, which includes a reception on the Friday evening and a full-day roundtable and lessons learned session for past participants on the Saturday. A commemorative publication: Rwanda Initiative: the first five years, will also be available at the event. The April 8 reception celebrating the Rwanda Initiative’s 5th anniversary will feature a multimedia presentation about the project, a performance by traditional Rwandan dancers, comments from past participants as well as brief remarks by Sen. Romeo Dallaire, a longtime supporter of the project. The evening will also include a silent auction of unique photographs from Rwanda captured by the PhotoSensitive team during their 2007 visit to the country.

Photographs can be previewed here.

The event is open to the public and will begin at 7 p.m. in Fenn Lounge in the Residence Commons building.

Confirm your attendance here.

Read more about the Rwanda Initiative.

Master of Journalism students Samia Madwar and Ora Morrison have won this year’s Carleton-Norway Journalism Travel Awards.  Norwegian Ambassador Else Berit Eikeland made the announcement yesterday at a brief ceremony in the university art gallery.

The awards are given to improve communication between Norway and Canada as northern countries, the ambassador said.

Samia, who grew up in Syria, has demonstrated her interest in northern issues, visiting Kuujjuaq, Quebec to research the impact of parasites and bacteria on subsistence hunting.  She wants to spend time pursuing stories about safety standards in the oil and gas industry in Norway’s Barents region and the effect of diseased wildlife on communities in the northern regions of both Canada and Norway.  She graduated from McGill University with a major in biology and was an intern at Canadian Geographic magazine and Air Canada’s enRoute magazine.

Ora is from Cayuga, Ont., where she worked as a reporter for The Grand River Sachem. In Norway, she wants to pursue stories about the comparative experiences of that country’s Sami and Canada’s Inuit regarding self-government and the preservation of indigenous cultures, and also plans to examine Internet penetration in both nations’ northern regions.  A business graduate from the University of Western Ontario, she has interned at an accounting company in Tunisia and at the St. Catharines Standard, and was active at the UWO student newspaper.

This is the second year the embassy has offered the award. The Norwegian government pays the costs for two Carleton journalism students to travel to Norway and work at a Norwegian publication, which again this year will be the Barents Observer, an English language newspaper in Kirkenes, located at the top of the country near the Russian border.

This year, the competition attracted 15 applicants.  Blogs by last year’s winners, B.A. student Margaret Cappa and M.A. student Chantaie Allick, were so popular that Norway’s foreign affairs ministry linked to them from their own website, Ambassador Eikeland said.

“It’s a cheesy line,” Iman Azman admits, “but it’s really true. Coming to Carleton has been a life-long dream.”

In a way, she has her dad to thank. When Iman was 12, he took her to a Canadian university fair in her hometown of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

“The Carleton booth was the first one I saw, and the woman there was really nice,” she recalls. “I knew I wanted to take journalism – CNN was always on at breakfast, and I loved to write and talk – and I knew Carleton had the best program.” When it came time for university, this was the only one she applied to.

“It was a bit of a gamble,” she concedes, “but if I hadn’t made it, I would’ve stayed home.”

Today, as Iman winds up her second year in Journalism and Political Science, she has become a Carleton ambassador herself, working for the Student Experience Office. Whether it’s helping serve tea at President Runte’s house, ushering at convocation, or participating in summer orientation, Iman enjoys giving folks a warm impression of Carleton students.

But her biggest responsibility has been to spearhead this year’s Alternative Spring Break (ASB), a program that links classroom learning with community service. She enjoyed participating in ASB during her freshman year, helping at a local school that serves mainly immigrant kids, and wanted to return to the program in a bigger role.

So last summer she found herself planning three ASB projects, including ones in Mexico and Guatemala, and revamping the Ottawa project to focus on poverty and homelessness.

The Ottawa team volunteered at a number of local organizations, from a drop-in centre to a soup kitchen, got a taste of poverty by living on a $7-a-day budget, and heard guest speakers who’d themselves lived on the street.

“There was real team-building,” Iman says. “At the end of the week, it was really hard to say goodbye to these 13 people. Luckily, I still see them around campus.”

She says the experience taught her not to be worried about reaching out to street people – even if it’s just to smile and say hello. She also learned organizations always need help. “Not enough students know about Carleton’s resources to connect them with local groups,” she says, pointing to the Student Experience Office Days of Service program as an example.

Planning for the three ASB projects – pulling together a fundraising plan, background reading, orientation sessions, and other logistics – meant she learned great skills: being quick on her feet, customer service, organization (“when you have to get up at 6:30 on Saturday morning to get to campus for 7:30, you’re pretty organized”).

Despite all that, Iman has carved out time for other interests. She serves on the executive of Carleton’s chapter of Journalists for Human Rights, maintains a blog, and is an avid photographer who sells some of her work for charity. She has also developed a passion for hockey (“back home the guys are really into soccer, but nothing compares to the fanaticism for hockey here”).

“I’m involved in so many things I feel a bit of pressure,” she admits. But that hasn’t cut into her academic achievements quite yet: last year, Iman was named a K. Phyllis Wilson Scholar.

"I selected this topic because it seems important to me to recognize that science has a life outside out the laboratory." Hamilton is the fourth recipient of the Faculty of Public Affairs Research Excellence Award.

Since 2007, the Faculty of Public Affairs has honoured faculty researchers with the Faculty of Public Affairs Research Excellence Award.  Recipients are awarded a good-sized stipend, or a modest stipend and a teaching release.   In either case, the successful applicants are asked to organize a lecture or launch a symposium some time during the following academic year on the topic of their research.

Sheryl Hamilton, FPA’s fourth recipient of the award, is busy preparing for her symposium, Knowing Bodies – Bodies of Knowledge, to be held on March 4th.

The symposium will focus on biotechnologies, and how they are rewriting how science understands the human body.  “These knowledge practices exceed the laboratory and can be found in film, in literature, in the mass and social media, in policy analyses, and in law,” says Hamilton.  “The meanings we ascribe to, and inscribe upon, the body in these various sites of cultural production open up powerful questions of politics and ethics.”

As Canada Research Chair in Communication, Law and Governance, Hamilton’s appointment crosses the disciplines of journalism, communication and law.  As a result, it was no surprise that her proposed research topic would take a multi-disciplinary approach.

“I selected this topic because it seems important to me to recognize that science has a life outside of the laboratory,” she says.  “It is impacted upon by the law and also is primarily witnessed by the public in media and popular culture.  Each of the scholars presenting in the symposium takes an interdisciplinary approach to biotechnological issues.”

A group of interdisciplinary scholars will be exploring the politics and ethics of biotechnology in a range of cultural perspectives. Presentation topics will include reproductive technology, security screening, human cloning, orphan drugs, genetic science in film, and representations of scientists, among others.

The symposium will be of interest to faculty, graduate students and senior undergraduate students who are interested in science and technology studies, law and science, cultural studies of science and technology, critical analysis of biotechnology policy, or, more generally, as Hamilton points out, “in the ways in which we understand science in a myriad of other social locations.”

The day will begin with breakfast at 8:30 p.m. and run until 2:30 p.m., and  followed by a celebration at Baker’s Grille to launch the book, Becoming Biosubjects: Bodies, Systems, Technologies, co-authored by Priscilla Walton and three of the symposium’s participants, and recently released by University of Toronto Press.

Further details on the conference will be available on the Faculty of Public Affairs web site in the coming weeks.