External publications

Approaching transcultural communication and the Global South: a conversation with Prof. Herman Wasserman

Li, Hangwei / Herman Wassermann
External Publications (2023)

in: Journal of Transcultural Communication 22 (2), 229-233

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jtc-2022-0019
Open access

Herman Wasserman is a Professor of Journalism at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has published widely on media, ethics and democracy in Africa and has consulted for organizations such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the Centre for International Media Assistance and given keynote addresses and invited lectures at universities worldwide. He has been a visiting scholar at Indiana University, Tsinghua University, the University of Houston and the Ludwig–Maximilian University. His awards include the Georg Foster Prize from the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Fulbright Fellowship, amongst others. He is often quoted in international media and serves on the editorial boards of more than fifteen international scholarly journals. He is Editor-in-Chief of the African Journalism Studies and the Annals of the International Communication Association. He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and an elected member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. In this interview, Wasserman talks about international inequality in communication and media studies, the importance of decolonizing communication studies, and the need to include more vantage points from the Global South in communication scholarship and knowledge production in general. Wasserman also discusses about the importance of revisiting indigenous philosophy while alerting us against romanticizing or essentializing these philosophies. He further talks about his recent works on media ethics, disinformation, and how they connect to the wider debate on topics such as information disorder in the Global South.