ACS_Gianpetro_FNT

SONIC Northwestern21min

Ellen Wartella

00:02

ICA presents.

Ellen Wartella

00:08

Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of ICA Podcast Network. Today our architect is Gianpietro Mazzoleni. He is Professor of Political Communication at the University of Milan and fellow of the International Communication Association. He is internationally known for his work on the impact of media on political systems and on the communication patterns of political institutions and actors. Co-founder and Editor of Comunicazione Politica, the Italian Journal of Political Communication, he is also a member of the editorial boards of various scholarly journals and editor-in-chief of the International Encyclopedia of Political Communication. Today, Gianpietro Mazzoleni will be in conversation with Cristian Vaccari, who is Professor of Political Communication and Co-director of the Center for Research in Communication and Culture at Loughborough University. And here is Cristian.

Cristian Vaccari

01:05

I met Gianpiero- that's how we call him in Italian, Gianpiero- when I was a PhD student in Milan. He was not in the university where I was studying, and I was introduced to him through a colleague. And without having ever met him, and without probably knowing anything of my scholarship, which was developing at the time, he came across to me as the most welcoming, inclusive and insightful colleague I had ever met- no offense to everyone else that I had met before him. And as I came to know him, I very quickly learned that I was not the only one to think that. He has been instrumental in nurturing generations of scholars in international political communication research, not only in Italy, where were both are from, but beyond, as testified for example by the fact that he founded the Summer School in Political Communication in Milan, which he had run since 2007, and through which many young scholars who are now established scholars have passed. And also more recently, by his receiving of the David Swanson Award for Service to Political Communication Scholarship, jointly awarded by the Political Communication divisions of ICA and APSA. Gianpiero has published extensively and made substantial scholarly contributions, and we're going to have a chance to talk about it during this podcast. So I will give him the floor and start by asking him, what's your story, Gianpiero? How did you come to study political communication, and what motivated you?

Gianpietro Mazzoleni

02:35

Thank you, Cristian for the nice words. How did I come to study political communication? Well, it might be a long story, but I'll make it short, of course. I had the chance and the opportunity, and I must say, also the luck, looking back now to the mid-60s, to be one of the early international students that attended American colleges in those days. Now it's kind of normal pattern. Many young people go to America to study, maybe for their master's degree or PhD. My case was after high school, I had the opportunity to win a scholarship from a private institution in Italy, and I could choose between the UK and the US to go for higher education and I chose the US. Well, that was really changing my life because, in those days, travel by air wasn't so easy, it was very expensive. So, I went for three years without returning back to my parents in Italy, and so I lived the full-time and full-immersion life in college at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. And eventually I decided after graduation to stay in the sociological or social sciences field for my doctorate.

Cristian Vaccari

04:00

How did you then become interested in communication?

Gianpietro Mazzoleni

04:04

That has to do, again, with my American experience, so to speak. Because when I was there between 1966 and '69, as a foreigner, I was a bit lost in the complexity of American life. I didn't have any background preparations in American life, in American politics. But I became quickly interested in what was going on in the United States. Those were the days of the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. The riots were upsetting all the inner cities in the United States. The war in Vietnam was at its climax. The media coverage of the bloody battlefields in Vietnam was changing the Americans' support for the war. Not being an American citizen, I couldn't enroll myself in the Students for a Democratic Society, which was one leading movement in those days. But I followed closely what was going on on campuses. Of course, I listened to pop and rock singers like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and watched the movie actors like Jane Fonda animating the demonstrations everywhere in the United States. And I remember very much the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. They nominated Hubert Humphrey, the candidate for the presidency. And then, unfortunately, in 1968, I remember very much the association of Martin Luther King and of Bob Kennedy. And Nixon, that year, won the presidential election, and he had also come to campus to speak. So all these things, eventually got me very much interested in communication and in political communication. And that's why eventually I pursued higher degrees in that sociological area.

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