Solutions to the challenge of misinformation have tended to focus on making journalism more transparent or credible, doing more fact-checking, or teaching audiences media literacy skills. An overlooked area of emphasis is the emotional well-being and connectedness of the audience, and how building up community and cultivating empathy within audiences can lead them to be more committed to finding shared sets of facts to build consensus, and thus less susceptible to misinformation and its negative effects.
Jessica Roberts is an assistant professor of communication studies in the Faculty of Human Sciences at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa. She is co-author of the 2018 book, American journalism and "fake news": Examining the facts, and her research on citizen journalism and social media has been published in Journalism and the International Journal of Communication, among other publications. Roberts earned her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland and her M.A. at the University of Southern California.
Held on November 16, 2023, this is the second lecture of an annual series organized by the Salzburg Global Center for Education Transformation. This year's lecture was kindly supported by the US Embassy in Vienna and was be delivered as part of Salzburg Global's Civic and Civil Education: Identity, Belonging and Education in the 21st Century program.
On December 14, 2022, the Salzburg Global Center for Education Transformation held its first public lecture during Education Transformation and Gender – Better Outcomes for Everyone.
In "How a City Used Access to Education to Work for Women," Shanaaz Majiet framed a South African story that revealed ways we can intervene in systems to confront the gender gap in how educational opportunities in cities work for women.
Shanaaz argues cities like Tshwane (Pretoria) are places of abundance, opportunity, and hope. At the same time, she adds cities worldwide are also places of unmet aspirations, despair, precariousness, vulnerability, and marginalization.
In South Africa, Shanaaz says democratic local governments must respond effectively to the reality of inequality by increasing access to growth and development opportunities for the youth, the vulnerable, and the urban poor and underserved citizens.
She believes that too many institutional failures in local government reveal the complexity of governance, leadership challenges, and the need for citizen-focused capacity-building interventions that deliver services and results that matter to the people served.
Shanaaz Majiet is a practitioner, master coach, coach mentor, trainer, and facilitator of leadership development with 27 years of experience. She assists individuals, teams, and organizations in building healthy institutions which rehumanize workplaces, one leader and team at a time.