The annual Ambassador Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy took place at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna from April 8 to April 10. The Media Inequality and Change Center (MIC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the American Austrian Foundation invited international experts on the topics of AI, human rights, labor, information production and access, journalism, diplomacy, and democracy to unpack implications, connections, and developments in the three-day seminar.
In total, twenty-three panelists, including journalists from the New York Times and The Washington Post, NGO representatives from Mali, Zimbabwe, Serbia, Hungary, Poland and the United States, academicians from Cambridge University, Rutgers University and London School of Economics and experts from the US Department of State presented on the evolution of media and diplomacy in the age of bots, bombs, and bilateralism.
Fifteen emerging scholar fellows from institutions in the US, Australia, Austria, Italy, Sweden, Germany, and the UK, as well as five observers rounded out the group. The individual sessions were moderated by Emil Brix (Director of the DA), Wolfgang Petritsch (President of the Austrian Marshall Foundation), Amelia Arsenault (Chief Public Diplomacy Research Officer at the US Department of State), Todd Wolfson (Co-Director of Media, Inequality & Change Center at the Annenberg School for Communication), Jillian York (Director of the International Freedom of Expression, Electronic Frontier Foundation), and Michael Freund (former Head of the Media Department at Webster University).
The intensive three-day seminar was complemented by excursions into Vienna’s cultural scene: scholars were invited to a tour of the exhibition Holbein. Burgkmair. Dürer – Renaissance in the North at Austria’s premier art museum, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, followed by dinner at the museum. On the last evening of the seminar, the group spent a lively evening at a Viennese Heurigen, a traditional local vineyard tavern, where local dishes and wine are served.
