SDGs Journalism Reporting Project
Universities from South-East Asia will be trained in sustainable development communication at University of Santiago de Compostela. LBUS is a member of this Erasmus + project consortium.
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) European project, which has one million euros for its implementation, will work on creating tools to effectively communicate in this field
Santiago, 17th of February 2020. Journalists and media play a key role in raising awareness in society about the objectives pursued by 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They decide what is relevant at an informative level, how to communicate and how they create a collective unconscious that establishes the public opinion. Journalistic Communication in this field needs to be independent, accurate and impartial, always under the premise of freedom of expression and quality.
A score of representatives from South-East Asian universities have taken part in the kick-off meeting of the project. This initiative, that has one million euros for its implementation, will be coordinated by the USC trough the Vice-Rectorship for Students and Internationalization and the Faculty of Communication Sciences. The project aims to equip journalism professionals with tools and knowledge to inform in this field in an effective way, focused on reaching the objectives set in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
“Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu (LBUS) is part of the project consortium. As a higher education institution, LBUS wants to contribute to a more sustainable and inclusive global education by integrating universal values into curriculum and research.
For LBUS, this is the first International Project that connects Journalism Higher Education to the SDGs, in an effort to align our work with universal values such as: gender equality, cultural diversity, access to education, extreme poverty, tolerance or environmental sustainability. Future journalists need to be proactive, aware of the fact that sustainability is especially nowadays tied to global complex problems, they need to take ownership, have agency, and build empathy. They are in the first line when it comes to writing compelling stories about the SDGs, they have the right tools to increase people’s awareness of why these goals matter and call for action.
The consortium, composed by eight universities from Romania, Cambodia, China, Luxembourg and Malaysia, is led by the teacher of the Faculty of Communication Sciences Marcelo Martínez Hermida. The members of the Romanian project team are: Associate Professor Roxana Săvescu (R&D Department), Associate Professor Minodora Sălcudean and Lecturer Adina Pintea (Department of Social Work, Journalism, Public Relations and Sociology) and Andreea Simina Porancea-Răulea (R&D Department).
The programme of the one-week event in Santiago included a kick-off meeting and different training activities about communication and sustainable development, as well as a visit to Lugo Campus.
Sustainable communication from different perspectives
The members of the consortium took part on the initial meeting of the project to define the main guidelines for its execution, as well as a specific training about journalistic communication and sustainable development, conducted in the Faculty of Communication Sciences.
The programme included seminars as an introductory in environmental communication and others about specific subjects like economy, transparency in information, gender perspective or big data in application to sustainable development.
Partners also visited Lugo Campus, where they were received by the deputy Vice Rector of Coordination for Research, Transfer and Innovation, Mª Elvira López Mosquera. They also did a tour of the Institute for Agricultural Biodiversity and Rural Development (IBADER) and they met the research group FARMATOX and the strategic aggrupation BioRedes. The journey ended with a visit to the city’s historical heritage.
