Posted on Sept. 26: He has the whole world under his watch

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BY Shelly Easton and Lisa Caines

September 26, 2003

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Imre_Szeman_opt.jpg” caption=”Imre Szeman”]Since joining McMaster's Faculty of English in 1999, Imre Szeman has been winning national recognition for his unique teaching and research style.

The 35-year-old is a leading researcher on globalization's effects on culture. A founding member of cultural studies groups in both Canada and the United States, Szeman is now the director of McMaster's Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition. Most recently he was named the inaugural winner of the 2003 Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award, which provides $25,000 to a new McMaster professor (less than eight years from a PhD) to encourage creative thinking about how undergraduate students can participate in University research.

Creativity isn't a problem for Szeman. He plans to use the award for a project beginning this fall called The World of News: Global Coverage of International Events  A Comparative Analysis. It will involve five undergraduate students who will analyze national newscasts from around the world to develop an understanding of how people interpret events on a local and global level.

Students will be using the new global video facility funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation that will allow them to monitor news broadcasts, record them in digital form on a hard drive and output them to DVD.

“As a team we will be looking at what kinds of things are not being focused on and why and how that produces a link between the local and the global,” said Szeman. “Part of this research is to understand what the international landscape looks like from different national sites.”

Integrating research with the undergraduate learning experience is a key element of the project.

“What we're aiming at is to get the students engaged in the inquiry and discovery process,” said Szeman. “It's sometimes difficult to integrate research, teaching and learning in the humanities as there is the notion of the solitary scholar in humanities. This award is meant to engage students directly in research and should be a project that will carry on into the future.”