Emerging Scholars Network Session

The aims of ESN (Emerging Scholars Network) is to bring 'young-at-heart' scholars together and to create lines of communication with researchers internationally. Their first session started with Hyunwoo Lee from Seoul National University, who presented an analysis which regards the network pattern of a joint submitted bill in the national assembly standing commitee. His research focus is the usage of social network and to domonstrate his ideas about it, he made a case study about the Committe on Broadcasting & Communications in South Korea.
After him, the session continued with Last Moyo from University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, whose paper is "Blogging Down a Dictatorship". Human rights, citizen journalism and the right to communicate in Zimbabwe are the topics of his paper. The researcher questioned how African citizens, from Kubatana city, have been adpating their lives to the arise of new media.
Another interesting paper from this session was elaborated by Katharine Reed Allen, from Pennsylvania State University, USA. Her article title is "Generacion Y: The Emerging Voice of Cuba". From an ideological discourse analysis, the author presented her results considering the information she collected from Cuban websites.
The last paper of the session was "Terrorism and Public Opinion: Rethinking the Role of Virtual Communities". Elaborated by Dana Janbek, from Lasell College, USA, and Paola Prado, the reserarch regards concepts like cyberterrorism. Both authors made a quantitative analisys which shows that the number of that type of websites and its visitors are higly increasing during the last decades.

Raquel Lobão e Renata Freitas