Section Head Election 2019 - Call for candidates and statements

Law Section

In accordance with the statues of IAMCR, I remind you of the upcoming elections in our Section for the posts of Chair and Vice-Chair. If you wish to be a nominee, you can send your proposal between now and 14th June to Gerard Goggin, the General Secretary, gerard.goggin [at] sydney.edu.au, or Valeria Zamisch at membership [at] iamcr.org

Section officers must be current IAMCR members, either directly or through an IAMCR institutional member who has listed them among its IAMCR representatives, and they must be members of the Political Economy Section.

Candidates and statements

For Co-Chair:

For Co-Vice-Chair:

Statements of candidates for Co-Chair

Loreto Corredoira (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)

In accordance with the statues of IAMCR, I wish to stand for the election as Co-Chair of the IAMCR Law Section. 

My proposal for the next term will be to change the structure of the Heads of the Law Section a bit:  instead of two vice-chairs, the new proposed structure would be two co-Chairs and two Co Vice-chairs, ideally opening these positions to younger researchers. 

Both Prof- Cetina and I intend to stand for re-election and to maintain the steady growth of the section. Dr. Sara Bannerman, who has been key for all the good work done during the last four years, has decided to step down as Co vice-chair. I would like to thank Dr. Bannerman for her dedication and years of collaboration and give her our best wishes for her continued work in her university. For the two new vice-Chair positions I wish to endorse the candidacies of Profs. Fernando Gutierrez, from Chile, and Lucas Logan, from the University of Houston in the United States.

Apart from continuing with the steady growth of the Section and solidifying a bigger team of heads for the Section to carry out all of our initiatives and can better serve all of our constituents in all parts of the world, we also wish to continue exploring a name-change for the Law section to a new name that better reflects all the different perspectives and approaches to the study of communication law and policy that exist beyond the strict analysis of the Law. This should help us expand the diversity and number of presenters and foster collaboration with other IAMCR sections, an initiative we have undertaken during the last four years. 

We would like to have feedback from you at a business meeting which will be held on Tuesday 9th July (time subject to confirmation), and in which you will be able to propose issues and themes for the coming years.

The Madrid 2019 team looks forward to see you.

Rodrigo Cetina Presuel (Harvard University, United States)

Over the last four years, I have had the pleasure of serving as Co-Vice Chair of the IAMCR Law section together with Professors Sara Bannerman, also Co-Vice Chair, and Loreto Corredoira as Chair. During this time, we have seen steady growth within the section, with more abstracts and presentations of relevant and interesting research each year. The Madrid conference saw a record number of submissions and we will have presentations from scholars from countries in North America Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. The Law Section has also organized a Pre-Conference on Communication Law and Ethics with 20-40 participants each year and we plan to continue doing so. Within the context of IAMCR, we have fostered collaboration with other sections, including co-organizing parallel sections with the Emerging Scholar Network and the Communication Policy and Technology sections. We hope this collaboration will continue in the future. The Law section has sought other opportunities for collaboration with Communication Law and Policy Divisions at other organizations. In the 2018-2019 Academic Year, the Law section had presence both at the ICA main conference and at AEJMC to explore future avenues of collaboration.

I have recently been appointed IAMCR Ambassador for the United States East Coast and if elected as Co-Chair of the section I expect to leverage that position to create opportunities for academic exchange to the benefit of the Law Section and other IAMCR areas outside of the main conference. If elected, we will present a parallel plan to my Ambassador strategy that will outline these opportunities, seeking collaboration with other communication associations within my circumscription. We also wish to continue exploring a name-change initiative that moves us to a more modern, inclusive and expansive name for the section that reflects all the diverse research perspectives and approaches to the study of communication law and policy and that can help the section grow in constituents. 

If elected, our plan is to solidify a strong team for 2020 and beyond with two Co-Chairs, with both Loreto Corredoira and myself in those positions, and with two Co-Vice Chairs. For these other two positions I wish to endorse Profs. Lucas Logan and Fernando Gutiérrez. I think we can form a strong team for the next four years, and with more hands on deck, we will be more capable to tend to the needs, requests, ideas and initiatives of the Law Section and its members from around the world.

Finally, I just wanted to thank Prof. Sara Bannerman for 4 successful years as Co-Vice Chair of the Law Section and for all of her hard and indispensable work during this time. 

Statements of candidates for Co-Vice-Chair

Fernando Gutiérrez-Atala (Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción, Chile)

I wish to stand as candidate for Co-Vice-Chair of the IAMCR Law section, within the context of the upcoming elections to be held in Madrid in the month of July. 

I am a journalist, with a Bachelor´s in Social Communication from the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción in Concepción, Chile (1998) and a PhD in Communication Science from Complutense University of Madrid (2008). 

My research explores the transformation of the journalistic profession, the changes in professional routines and labor, legal and ethical challenges that these changes have brought about. In this context, I have been at the head of a qualitative study of Latin America in related to the vices and determinants of journalism in the technological arena and the effects this has in information products. I have done this with a team of academics and professionals from Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Ecuador. Together we have produced more than a dozen articles (indexed in Scopus and Scielo), book chapters and presentations at conferences around the world. 

Parallel to this, I have been a reviewer for a number of Latin American scientific journals, and I am an International Accreditor for the Latin American Council for the Accreditation of Journalism Studies (CLAEP in Spanish). 

Since 2015 in Montreal, I have constantly been attending and presenting at IAMCR Conferences in Leicester (2016), Cartagena de Indias (2017) and Eugene (2018). During all this time I have participated as a peer reviewer for abstracts submitted to the IAMCR Law Section and as Chair and Discussant on a number of parallel sessions at all the aforementioned conferences and will do so in IAMCR 2019 as well. I have been a close collaborator with the law section and, apart from attending various IAMCR, pre and post conferences, I have been organizing the last four editions of the International Forum for Communication Law and Ethics IAMCR pre-Conference, alongside with the current heads of the Law Section and other colleagues. 

Because of all of the above, being elected as Co-Vice Chair of the IAMCR Law section for the next four years will be fundamental to allow me to foster and increase the links between scholars and researchers from Latin America, the Caribbean and other countries around the world. I would also take advantage of this position to organize regional meetings around topics related to communication and the law, and to promote reflection on law and ethics applied to new phenomena that condition the current professional reality of journalists. 

Lucas Logan (University of Houston – Downtown, United States)

I wish to stand for the election of Co-Vice Chair of the Law Section of IAMCR.

I am an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Houston – Downtown. My research emphases are copyright, privacy, intermediary liability, and other general areas of information policy and communication law. I have multiple journal articles and book chapters on these topics. I also teach courses in media law, communication technology, communication policy, and theories of free speech.

I have presented work at the Law Section at every IAMCR since 2015. In the past, I have worked with the current chair, Loreto Corredoira, and all of the vice chairs to review abstracts and moderate panels. Although I have never served as a chair or co-chair at IAMCR, I believe that I have been active enough in the Law Section to understand the necessity and complexity of the position for which I am seeking election. 

If elected, I would work to continue to keep the section a relevant scholarly forum for communication law through organizing diverse sets of panels and papers on current, relevant issues. I believe that after years of dedication to and participation in the section, I am primed for a leadership role to keep our work moving forward and building our area of scholarship.

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