2017年1月19日，在杭师大美术学院会议室举办了题为“当新闻和社交媒体融合：多元文化话语和公民辩论的结果”的学术研讨会以及讲座，此次讲座的主讲人是厄勒布鲁大学Gwen Bouvier教授。施旭教授主持了此次讲座。

讲座摘要：

There have been both positive and negative positions taken on the way that social media can contribute to the dissemination of multicultural discourses and to intercultural communication. As regards the latter, in discourse studies there is now a body of work that points to the way that social media tend towards more insular communities of opinion, or that cultural and ethnic identities, ideas and values can be re-contextualized for specific ideological purposes. And it has learned that social media tend to have a promotional and pseudo event nature. But what the author wants to discuss here is that discourse scholars need to also consider the way that news media are now highly integrated with, and dependent upon, social media – it is from here that stories are drawn, recontextualised and then re-posted. Using an example that began on Twitter (#twowomentravel) when two women live-blogged their trip to the UK to get an abortion, the author shows that this has very specific and important consequences for multicultural discourse scholarship.

The author begins this paper looking at the mechanics as to how news is increasingly generated, not in a more tradition way through new agencies or from official sources, but through social media engagement. The author shows how this is aligned with advertising, driving traffic and underpinned by the logics of political economy. The author then looks at specific example, how it began on Twitter, was picked up by a news outlet and then attracted masses of reactions, including celebrities and politicians, which of course in itself became newsworthy. Postings and discussion then took place across social media platforms. She looks across a sample of these postings with a view to raising discussion about the nature of the civic debate as regards the discourses surrounding women’s rights versus religious and moral obligation.