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Salzburg Academy and MDLAB student Maya al Majzoub reflects on her summer

This summer saw the seventh annual Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change held at Schloss Leopoldskron, Austria, the home of Salzburg Global Seminar.

It also saw the launch of the first ever Media and Digital Literacy Academy of Beirut hosted by long-term Salzburg Academy partner, the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

Here, AUB media studies Master's student Maya al Majzoub reflects on her experience of both programs and how they have "empowered" her.

Living in a traumatized region of the world, the toughest feeling to cope with is the loss of hope. When you start waking up everyday fearing it could be your last is when you existentially start to fade. You lose your energy, surrender your dreams, and believe that no change is coming.

Although I’m generally a positive person, but living in a sectarian fragmented Arab context, always threatened by war and clashes, has taken its toll on me. Every now and then, I felt frustrated and powerless.

I needed some sort of motivation, some sort of reminder that I still have a role to play to help change things in my beloved Lebanon, even on the smallest scale, and to be honest, this was the real essence behind why I wanted to get involved in both “The Salzburg Academy for Media and Global Change” and the “Media and Digital Literacy Academy of Beirut” (MDLAB).

Things happened fast! In six consecutive weeks, I participated in both academies. For my first three weeks in the Salzburg Academy, it wasn’t just about the academics. In Salzburg, it was also about going back to nature after being detached for so long, going back to hear the “sound of music” everywhere.

Our souls definitely needed that sanctuary, as we’ve been a region traumatized with tragedy for so long that we lost touch with nature and beauty. But professionally, in one word, both academy experiences were “empowering”.

Seriously, what could be more empowering than learning to become a producer in the marginalized side of the world? To be guided how to use media’s constructive potential to advocate human rights and aid the Arab world’s transition to democracy? In that, I found my muse.

By meeting multinational highly-qualified professors and students with an inspiring entrepreneurial drive, I learned to see things differently; this huge digital space we have at hand, just a click away, is no longer to be taken for granted, but to be used to tell our stories to the whole world, to resist propaganda, and to be a voice for the voiceless.

The world has to know the truth about what’s happening in the Arab world, and we have to expose the suffering. Realizing that each one of us actually has this power to influence the way things are by just learning to tactfully use media was truly reviving.

This is precisely why I directly volunteered to assist on the newly-launched MDLAB; to learn more how media literacy can be applied within an Arab context, especially since the Academy aimed to encourage Arab media scholars and students to introduce media literacy into their universities’ curricula.

MDLAB was co-chaired by Dr. Jad Melki and Dr. May Farah, who were both on the Salzburg Academy’s faculty. During the last week of the Academy, right before the participants’ final presentations, I organized a presentation panel where, together with some of the Lebanese participants in the Salzburg Academy (Farah Shehadeh, Tasnim Chaaban, and Shadi Hamdar), we shared our Salzburg experience, covering both the academic aspect of it, such as our exploratory case studies and film productions, and the social aspect, such as the global interaction we shared and the blog we created. Interestingly, the MDLAB participants then directly felt inspired to start their own blog.

To me, what was particularly remarkable was the ability of some MDLAB participants, especially those from Syria, to try and maintain their academic focus despite having their families left in the Syrian war zone.

If anything, this proves how determined a large portion of Arabs are to arm themselves with all sorts of peaceful and constructive tools of change—media literacy being a highly significant one of them.

As for now, I’m mainly concerned with how to use my own media platform, that is, my job as a reporter on one of the Lebanese social talk-shows, to critically highlight and treat significant social issues, through applying media literacy concepts.

In the end, it all boils down to this: From time to time, we all need to be reminded that we do have the power to change things, and media literacy can do that quite practically!