México

To talk about human rights today, in a country like Mexico, with so many violent deaths and countless kidnappings, journalists included, raises the question: what has happened to communication? In the last three years, Mexicans have seen the first page of the daily news turn red: drug cartels rolling the heads of their recently beheaded rivals, attacking military and police headquarters, eliminating the media workers that annoy them and killing civilians that dare to denounce them.

México

Perhaps, issues regarding the diversity of development and human rights would seem appealing to the new generations if we were able to picture culture as something more than just a Google commercial portfolio, five or six publishing houses and two or three record companies interrupted by the presence of underground videos on YouTube. Perhaps, the words culture, communication, and human rights are reinventing their sense of expression in other constructions of meaning whose power depends on what happens with the intellectual rights of creators and the connective rights of audiences.

México

Unequal access to communicational options is a source of additional stress, in the performance as well as in the study of the media. Bound by commercial, corporate, political, union interests and other restrictions, the contemporary media tend to resist societal demands and participation. Thus, it seems appropriate yet paradoxical that the subject of the annual Conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research be human rights and communication. While specific issues such as international communication, sports and media, communication and aids or Islam and the media are being analysed, the general context of this Conference is the problematisation of human rights.

México

As a scientific community, we the communication researchers of the world aim with our work to contribute to the struggle for democracy in communication systems and strive for political and cultural diversity. In my opinion, promoting such diversity within our association is essential. That is why I celebrate the effort of this meeting. I want to close my lecture in the same way I started it, quoting Renato Ortiz: “It would be ideal to speak all the languages in which the social sciences are expressed. We would then possess not a universality of spirit, but a library at the service of a greater wealth of knowledge”. Thus, I sum up the utopian ideal of this morning with the aim of recovering specificities by making languages relevant, as they are the expression of our worldviews.