Ithaca College

Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies and Codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, and Dale Hudson, Associate Professor of Cinema at New York University-Abu Dhabi, were the invited keynote speakers for the Health and Media International Initiative at Tampere University, Finland on October 1, 2020. 

Their lecture was entitled “Small Media and Covid 19’s First Wave:  Information Against Infodemics, Disinformation, Silence.”  

The talk argued for the necessity of small media operating beyond mainstream media in social networks and across different platforms to counter infodemics and disinformation on the global pandemic.  

Their talk analyzed low budget, low tech, multi-platformed media projects from around the globe including Benin, France, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, United States, Kuwait, South Africa, Germany, and China.   

This international initiative is sponsored by Tampere University, Unit of Communication Sciences, Faculty of Information Science and Technology, University Network for Asian Studies, and Tampere Russian and Chinese Media Research Center.  

The event is unique in that it runs a series of keynote addresses from leading international scholars and public health experts through December 2020 and is also an international course for Bachelor’s, Master’s and post-graduate level students.  

The initiative asks key questions about the impact of the pandemic:

What is the role of media in shaping our understanding of health and illness and how are these perceptions of health and illness changing in Chinese and Russian contexts of traditional and modern medicines?  

How do we understand health and illness in the age of social media? Has the COVID-19 pandemic boosted the digitalization of health and health care communication and influenced our perception of health and illness? How can information limit or intensify the corona virus outbreak?  

What is the interconnection between health, illness, and media in relationship to well-being, e-health, and death?