New ALAIC Board
The Latin American Association of Communication Research (ALAIC) has elected a new board on May 14, 2005. The new President of ALAIC is Bolivian Erick R. Torrico Villanueva, who was elected unanimously for the period of 2005-2008, during the General assembly held in Sao Paulo.Project XXI was the name of the electoral platform that received general approval from both individual and institutional members of ALAIC, who also attended the seminar "Democratising Communication: a pending task? 25 years of the New World Information and Communication Order and the MacBride Report", which took place in the above mentioned Brazilian city. During the meeting, ALAIC presented the first issue of the Latin American Journal of Communication Sciences, with essays written by Luis Ramiro Beltrán y Jesús Martín Barbero, among other contributors.
The platform presented by the new board states that the association is facing new challenges that call for articulated and progressive measures. Among the challenges, it mentions the conceptual lowering of communication studies, the pervasive predominance of the market mentality that affects the theoretical discourse and the abandonment of the critical approaches among faculties, professors and professionals, and even among researchers specialised in this field. It also refers to the urgency of better relating Latin American research with the research going on in rest of the world.
The new ALAIC board identified four main axes in the proposed work plan: faculty, research, extension and debate, and announced that in a near date will release plans for each of the above categories.
Other than Erick Torrico, who is the Director of the Master Degree on Communication for Development at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar, the new board also includes Alfredo Alfonso from Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina), César Siquiera Bolaño from Universidad Federal de Sergipe (Brasil), Migdalia Pineda de Alcázar from Universidad del Zulia (Venezuela), Octavio Islas from Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey (México) and Ancízar Narváez from Universidad Pedagógica Nacional (Colombia).
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