The SLAM seminar has started in the beautiful city of Sarajevo, where young people from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Italy, Serbia and Turkiye gathered.
What were we doing on begining?
- Energizer
- Getting to know each other through fake traits
- Workshop on “Pros and cons of media in the participants’ countries”
- Workshop on “What the media lies about the most”, where participants presented three most common topics: economy, Covid – 19 and VIPs.
As you are already familiar with, SLAM seminar is currently ongoing in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where professionals and youth workers from countries, came together to discuss/disseminate the activities done for the project and to discuss ideas for the next part of the project.
Now we will tell you a bit about SLAM. Structured Learning for Awareness in Media” (SLAM) aims at enhancing young people’s awareness and critical thinking on the role of Mass Media as a challenge and precondition for more inclusive societies towards migrants and refugees.
Structured Learning for Awareness in Media” (SLAM) aims at enhancing young people’s awareness and critical thinking on the role of Mass Media as a challenge and precondition for more inclusive societies towards migrants and refugees.
The Council of Europe’s Report “Media Regulatory Authorities and Hate Speech” (2018) underlines the historical significance of media in enticing and feeding the climate of hatred and violence characterizing West Balkan’s turbulent past. The Balkans are still a primary example of media consciously or even deliberately using hate speech for sensationalistic purposes, thereby supporting it and causing its recurrence and reinforcement at the societal level.
Bosnia and Herzegovina has recently taken a foremost importance as a transit node for migrants and refugees seeking entrance in EU territory, a trend which the UNHCR (2018) recognized as exponentially increasing in 2018, from the 198 arrivals in December 2017 to the 666 registered in the peak month of March 2018. The strain posed on the local relief system by this surge has contributed to a growing sense of local unrest and discontent, which national mass media have so far been able to answer by providing the public with awareness and understanding circa the phenomenon, in many instances providing an amplifier to internal currents of distrust, hate and stereotyping.
From the European perspective, significant indications might be extracted from analysing media coverage about the reception and integration of migrants/refugees.
The CoE in its 2017 Report “Media coverage of the refugee crisis: a cross-European perspective” underlines the role played by media in fuelling societal hate speech as consisting in an abetting/legitimacy factor to explicit hate speech brought about by shallow and sensationalistic coverage.
Against this backdrop, there emerges the opportunity of exploring the similarities, differences and potential synthesis among the different yet interrelated challenges faced by West Balkans countries and Europe within a transnational effort aimed at laying the grounds of a greater media literacy and critical thinking at the level of the youth and, by extension, of society as a means to provide an antidote against phenomena of hate speech and a building block of successful integration processes.
The SECOND day of the SLAM seminar was long and many topics have been discussed.
- SWOT analysis of the social media implementation of SLAM. Different groups have been brainstorming and thinking about following: strengths , weaknesses, opportunities and threats that could affect this project.
- Social media campaign – How to implement different techniques and methods in SLAM social media campaign. Some of the ideas given were:
- Employing celebrities/influencers that would help with the reach
- Subsections of the main SLAM page in different languages where content related to certain country could be published,
- Fliers,
- Self- fact Check Guide,
- Helping young people in becoming more media literate, how to spot fake news and how to report it.
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We spent day 3 doing next:
- Workshop aimed at devising a campaign against spreading false news and raising awareness of the importance of timely and correct media reporting;
- Presentations of designed ideas and events;
- Presentations of national teams on the topic of the presence and representation of migrants in the national media.
The last day of the SLAM seminar is today and it was a great pleasure and honor to participate in this event in particular, but also the project in general.
Today we did an evaluation of the seminar, workshops and presentations. We summarized the impressions of this short but sweet event and awarded certificates for participation. In addition to diplomas, we have gained knowledge, new friends and memories that we will be happy to remember and share. Thanks to all participants for their valuable contributions, experiences and ideas and gatherings.
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