The 21st century is arguably the era of peak globalisation. Our use of transnational communications platforms is consolidating the internationalisation of finance, trade and culture that began centuries earlier, and we’re seeing global problems like climate change and the spread of disinformation worsening. A globalised world also needs to share its decentralised knowledge, creating new opportunities for internationalised education and necessitating more culturally sensitive approaches to learning, teaching and research.

This chapter explores how MECO has responded to these challenges, and the strategies staff have adopted to make the most of the opportunities that “going global” has presented. The department has embraced rapid changes in the curriculum, an increase in international student enrolments, and greater research collaboration with academics and academic institutions worldwide.

Gerard Goggin noted that MECO established its international research reputation over the course of its first decade, especially in areas such as digital media studies, media policy and the nascent area of journalism studies. In its 20th year, the department has become an influential research destination for international academics and a popular choice for international students, particularly from China and the Asian region.

“At its inception in 2000, MECO was focused on the national scene, and where it fitted, as a relative latecomer to media and communications in Australian universities,” Goggin said. “In the intervening two decades MECO has become notably more international – not just because of the growing internationalisation and globalisation of universities in Australia and worldwide (rudely interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic). Rather, especially because MECO’s bearings and interests – especially in research – deepened in their international character and nature as the department grew in international reach and influence. In addition, media and communications as a field has internationalised significantly (if unevenly) in the last two decades, and Australian researchers have both led and taken advantage of this.”

Goggin noted that MECO increasingly nurtured a disposition for multicultural, cosmopolitan and international research, especially via scholars with interests in the Asian region and Latin America, as well as Europe and the USA. Over the years, this trend spread throughout the department and solidified MECO’s reputation for research excellence. MECO also made key appointments of scholars from other countries who played a crucial role in enlarging the perspectives of the department.

The department’s researchers have published leading monographs and edited volumes, some with a signature emphasis on the need for greater internationalisation in the field – for example, Goggin’s own Routledge companion to global internet histories (2018). Goggin also established the Digital Rights and Governance in Australia and Asia research group, and has been a globally leading scholar in mobile media and disability media.1 He is the secretary general of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) based in Prague.

A very long list of academics have contributed to MECO’s internationalisation – below is a brief history of some of the key figures and their work.

The author of Fresh milk: The secret life of breasts (2003), Fiona Giles co-edited a special issue of the International Breastfeeding Journal on breastfeeding in public. Giles also collaborated as co-editor with Bunty Avieson and Sue Joseph, producing two edited collections for Routledge with international contributors: Still here: Memoirs of trauma, illness and loss (2019) and Mediating memory: Tracing the limits of memoir (2018).

“That is happening all the time as many edited collections will seek to bring together scholars from a diverse range of countries. It not only showcases work from around the globe, but also extends the relevance of the collection to a broader audience,” Giles said.

Alana Mann emerged as a global activist in food politics with her research on La Via Campesina, an organisation that works with farmers from Mexico and Chile on peasant and farmers’ rights and food sovereignty. In 2021, Mann was co-chief investigator for FoodLab Sydney, a central element of the City of Sydney’s engagement in the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (MUFPP).

Several academics joined MECO in 2008, bringing with them extensive international expertise. Penny O’Donnell’s rich background in international media is evident in her teaching and development of MECO units. A senior lecturer in international media and journalism, she took over as unit coordinator of MECO6926: International Media Practice. O’Donnell has also pursued international research, investigating employment trends and job loss in journalism around the world. The book Journalists and job loss, edited by Timothy Marjoribanks, Lawrie Zion, O’Donnell and Merryn Sherwood, was published in 2021.

Stephanie Hemelryk Donald was professor of Chinese Media Studies at MECO in 2009 and 2010. Working across Chinese Studies (with Jeff Riegel) and the School of Literature, Arts and Media, she was part of a major push toward internationalisation at the time.

Fiona Martin’s interest in international debates on online media and communications regulation led to research funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) on safe, inclusive news commenting, with Goggin on global mobile media, and with Tim Dwyer on social media news sharing. Martin and Dwyer co-authored Sharing news online (Palgrave, 2019), which examines how the rise of social media platforms has transformed journalism. Martin subsequently won, with colleagues from the University of Sydney and University of Queensland, one of Facebook’s first Content Policy on Social Media Awards, producing the report Facebook: Regulating hate speech in the Asia Pacific (2021). Martin and Terry Flew also co-edited the open access collection Digital platform regulation: Global perspectives on internet governance (2022), and wrote and co-edited, with Gregory Lowe, the RIPE Association for Public Media Researchers’ highest selling reader: The value of public service media (2014). She has most recently been the Asia region lead on a UNESCO project investigating digital violence against women journalists.

Dwyer became a visiting foreign professor at the College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University in 2020. In 2021, Dwyer worked with Jianguo Deng (Fudan University), Yun Wu (Zhejiang University) and Jonathon Hutchinson (University of Sydney) as part of an international four-year ARC-funded Discovery project exploring innovation and shifts in media pluralism, policies and regulation, researching online news and diversity in China.

Joyce Nip works extensively in the international space. Having worked in television, radio, newspapers and magazines, mainly in Hong Kong, Nip has more than 20 years of experience in journalism teaching, research and practice. She has taught units at graduate and postgraduate level on the processes of media production and consumption in the greater China region.

Much of Nip’s research is in political communication and many of her research collaborations have been in Taiwan and Hong Kong. “At the moment I’m working on an externally funded collaborative research project on China’s propaganda with a colleague in the School of Languages and Cultures and another colleague in Taiwan, which is supported by an external research grant,” she said.

Having worked and taught in multiple countries, Olaf Werder maintains relationships with global partners, among them the University of Nottingham UK; the University of Augsburg, Germany; Fudan University, China; the University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand; and the University of Florida, USA. He has given keynote addresses at many of these institutions. Werder also joined the International Health Humanities Network, where he is an advisory board member working to advance the field in Australia.

Benedetta Brevini’s international collaborations have been long-term commitments of two or three years. Three of her book projects involved 50 scholars from around the world. “You have the duty to engage with other scholars that do not belong to your field so you can bring other perspectives. That’s particularly true with edited collections, calling on international scholars with particular expertise and publishing with international publishers,” she explained.

Brevini holds Visiting Fellowships at the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism at City University, London; at WZB Berlin Social Science Institute; and at the Centre for Media, Data and Society at the Central European University, Budapest. Of the experience, Brevini said, “Visiting other universities as a researcher and establishing links with like-minded researchers is another pathway to establish fruitful collaborations.”

Bunty Avieson continued the work she began in her PhD, investigating the evolving mediascape of the small Himalayan country of Bhutan and how this oral culture has embraced digital media. In 2020, she began an ARC-funded project working with the Bhutanese community in Canberra and Bhutan to contribute to English Wikipedia and to develop their own Dzongkha Wikipedia.

In 2019, Avieson successfully nominated Bhutan’s first journalist, Dasho Kinley Dorji, for a University of Sydney Honorary Doctorate. During his visit, Dasho Kinley headlined a special Sydney Ideas event, where he was interviewed by his former classmate, TV compere Andrew Denton, about his extraordinary career, which started when the King of Bhutan sent him to Australia to study journalism in the 1970s.2

In July 2020, Avieson was appointed to the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee and Wikimedia Australia. She is chief investigator on a collaboration with the Tata Institute of Social Science in Mumbai, India, along with two colleagues from History at the University of Sydney, in a project that aims to equip members of the Tamil diaspora in Sydney and Mumbai to edit Tamil Wikipedia.

The University of Sydney has established links with universities around the world, including a MECO-specific exchange agreement that Avieson helped secure with O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU) in 2020. Super Exchange Agreements also exist between MECO and the University of Toronto, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Texas at Austin.

The focus on digital cultures, both globally and in the department, has been increasing rapidly. Goggin pointed to this trend, observing that in its second decade, MECO explicitly sought to raise its international profile in the emerging area of digital media studies.

Among the many examples is Hutchinson’s collaboration with the University of Hong Kong on “Blocked by YouTube: Unseen digital intermediaries for social imaginaries in Vietnam”, which was funded through Sydney Southeast Asia Centre (SSEAC).

Justine Humphry has initiated several international collaborations that extend her research on mobile media and marginalised publics. Humphry’s multidisciplinary collaboration with the University of Glasgow on the Smart Publics research project examined the social significance, design and governance of smart street furniture. Humphry and Chris Chesher collaborated with Australian and Korean experts to share knowledge of the deployment of robots and smart technologies in public spaces in the Australia–Korea Partnership on Mobile Robot Development in Public Space, led by Naoko Abe in the Sydney Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems.

Humphry and Chesher have also been collaborating with Arisa Ema at the University of Tokyo for the Australia/Japan Foundation on Smart Cities in Japan. They plan to run a Smart Cities Forum in Japan, which will draw together researchers, industry and the public at an international event on urban robots, artificial intelligence and the future city.

Olga Boichak is originally from Ukraine, where she managed political campaigns and ran a survey research centre for more than 10 years before joining academia. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2014, following the revolution and the ensuing war with Russia, to study the role of digital media in armed conflicts and is now editor of the Digital War journal.

Ukraine is the focus of Boichak’s two collaborative projects: with Tanya Lokot (Dublin City University), investigating transnational mobilisation in Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests; and with Brian McKernan (the Centre for Computational and Data Sciences at Syracuse University, USA), exploring the role of narratives in practices of critical citizenship in Ukraine.

Boichak has organised panels on digital cultures in the Ukrainian context at premier international conferences, such as the International Studies Association Annual Convention, International Communication Association Conference, the Australian Sociological Association and Migrant Belongings. These panels brought together international scholars working at the intersection of media, conflict and activism in the contemporary Ukrainian context. In Sydney, Boichak has continued to work with her long-time mentor, Jeff Hemsley (Syracuse University), with whom she co-led a project on orchestrated interventions and bots in political discourse during elections. In this project, the team developed a novel analytic approach to identify computational propaganda on Twitter and presented their research at the Alan Turing Institute in London.

The collaborations presented above touch only briefly on the various methods academics use to collaborate with colleagues globally. Conferences offer another fertile ground for establishing international collaborations, including those held in Sydney. These have provided vital opportunities for the exchange of ideas that might lead to research or teaching collaborations.

MECO has hosted numerous international conferences in recent years, including the RIPE 2012 conference of international public service media scholars – the first time this event had been held outside Europe. Goggin recalls the 2017 Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA) conference, which showcased the sea change in both national and international scholarship in the field. The conference hosted keynotes from the then International Communication Association president, Paula Gardner (McMaster University); the theorist of global media and communications, Daya Thussu (University of Westminster, then Hong Kong Baptist University); editor of the Journal of Communication Silvo Waisbord (George Washington University); and pre-eminent Australian scholar of Chinese media, Wanning Sun (University of Technology Sydney). Other examples include the Crossroads Cultural Studies conference in 2018 and the Journalism Studies Conference in 2019.

Smaller seminar events aimed at kick-starting collaborative research are also frequent. For example, the Health Humanities Conference in 2015, with key scholars from the UK and Shanghai, China, encouraged new approaches to public health communication research. Speakers included Ian Maxwell (University of Sydney), and Hui-Jing Shi (Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health, Fudan University).

The MECO Media@Sydney seminar series, which started in 2007, also has become a destination for international researchers, hosting many leading scholars such as Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku, Finland) and Mark Deuze (University of Amsterdam).

Masterclasses with visiting international scholars and journalists have provided further opportunities for students. A notable example was a masterclass held by David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and the author of The making of Donald Trump (2016).

Giles was also among those who took the opportunity for a teaching exchange and went to Beijing Foreign Studies University. “We organised conferences together and students would then come from Beijing and do a master’s, and the same for Fudan, so those are partnerships that were really developed in the course of years,” she said.

Goggin recalled, “Various MECO staff taught at overseas universities at various times, such as Steven Maras who took advantage of USYD’s longstanding relationship with Fudan University in Shanghai to teach a semester there.”

The increasing premium MECO researchers put on fully engaging with the international field is also evident from their participation in key scholarly associations. These include: the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR); the International Communication Association (of which Flew served as president); the Association of Internet Researchers (with the leadership of Hutchinson); and the World Journalism Education Council (with whom Martin has just finished a global survey of educator attitudes).

Beate Josephi, who retired from Edith Cowan University in 2013, is now an honorary associate working with MECO. She brought many connections with her, including the IAMCR with which she has been involved for more than 20 years, as chair of their journalism research and education section for six years, then as treasurer and chair of the Council’s election committee. “It has made me talk to people like Gerard [Goggin] who is general secretary of IAMCR now for the second time, and I’m very glad about that,” she said. “And I was extremely glad to see Fiona Martin elected to the Council.”

Among her international endeavours, Josephi lists a stint as visiting professor in 2020 at Suleyman Demirel University (SDU), Almaty, Kazakhstan. This will be an ongoing relationship. Her other work is with the research project Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS) from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. The first WJS survey included 21 countries, the second 67 countries, and work has begun on WJS wave3, which includes more than 100 countries. “As part of the WJS team, I'll investigate Uzbekistan with a colleague from SDU for WJS wave3 (for wave2 I did Bhutan). Bunty Avieson is doing Bhutan wave3.”

In her view, Australia benefits from being among the most advanced research countries in the English-speaking world. At the same time, she says, “it becomes ever clearer you cannot ignore the rest of the world”, citing the increasing tensions between China and the United States as examples of how quickly things can change. “I think it is almost inevitable that you take into consideration all continents, rather than just a few who can speak to each other on more or less equal terms.”

Josephi echoes Goggin’s view that MECO is well positioned in its international partnerships, especially because of the very high standing of its research, which she says makes the department “enormously attractive” to others as a research partner.

“MECO should continue collaborations not only with the top 50 universities but also with some of those in other countries – especially where students come from – to keep fostering understanding of the world out there. That makes it easy for them and attractive for students to be a student at MECO.”