Schiller & Smythe Awards

Schiller and Smythe Awards 2006

IAMCR announced the winners of the Schiller and Smythe Awards at its Annual Conference in Cairo on 26 July.

Stijn Joye was awarded the IAMCR Prize in Memory of Herbert I. Schiller for his paper "Raising Awareness in a Digital Society: The case of IPS Flanders", and Felicity Brown received the IAMCR Prize in Memory of Dallas W. Smythe for her contribution "Rethinking the Role of Surveillance Studies in the Critical Political Economy of Communication".

Joye’s paper analyses the role of the Dutch-language service of the alternative news agency Inter Press Service (IPS), asseses its impact on the mainstream news sector and calls for the agency to adopt “faster and more professional” practices if it “wishes to maintain its unique role of sensitising the audience and bridging the information gap between North and South”.

Stijn Joye with the Working Group Film & Television Studies at Ghent University, Belgium. 

The Schiller prize is awarded to the author of "a paper which combines scholarly excellence with a commitment to developing and extending the critical, innovative and engaged spirit that characterised Herbert Schiller's own contribution to communications analysis".

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Felicity Brown's paper focuses on surveillance practices associated with the workplace, consumer activity, urban spaces and intelligence gathering and argues that, even if surveillance may be neutral when viewed from a macro perspective, it is a constitutive element of informational capitalism, and its relationships with power should be analysed.

The paper was judged by the award panel to be of a high scholarly standard and very much in keeping with the critical perspective that Smythe encouraged throughout his career.

Felicity Brown is a Lecturer in the Communication Studies Department, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.

 Download the full paper... (190.09 KB)