Fusari’s seminars focus on how to translate the personal and political for diverse audiences through digital media.
Over the last several years, Dr. Massimiliano Fusari has been exploring the relation between art, visual reporting and digital diplomacy to assess the expanding possibilities of media communication, and balance reporting with interpreting. As contemporary societies are more and more visual-centred, he has been providing hands-on and practice-informed tools and skills to analyse, engage and finally produce Visual Storytelling.
MASSIMIIANO'S SEMINARS
Training – Visual Storytelling
The training on Visual Storytelling presents and contextualizes a practice-led toolkit for the analysis, research and production of visual communication.
Training is fully audience-tailored, and specifically arranged to serve the hosting institution’s mission: it ranges from a few hours to a comprehensive academic module. To achieve agreed-upon objectives, Massimiliano relies on theoretical sessions, multimedia presentations, and hands-on workshops for participants to experience the extent to which visual communication is ‘post-produced,’ multimedia and digitally formatted.
Depending on the chosen format, field of intervention, and aims, training might include a series of case studies on the Muslim world, both in its local and online specificities, to test discussed best-practices against some of today’s most sensitive cultural and political topics. As an example, to address ISIS’ online video distribution policies, and juxtapose ISIS’ storytelling techniques to Western media narratives, will make participants appreciate the extent to which multiple visual grammars compete across the same media channels. To complement the scenario, a recent report from Facebook’s Marketing Director foresees the platform to completely abandon verbal media for visual communication by 2020.
By the end of training, participants will be able to (1) Contextualize the pivotal centrality of today’s visual communication; and (2) Apply learnt lessons to precise contexts, including international politics, digital diplomacy, and transcultural communication.
For more information and to discuss required necessities for consulting and training, please contact consulting@massimedia.com.
Photographic editing hands-on session with MA students, University of Exeter (UK) © Fusari / Massimedia, 2012.
Training – Digital Diplomacy
Available beginning March 2017, the training seminar Digital Diplomacy presents and contextualizes the new forms and formats of today’s diplomatic communication relying on digital media.
Training is fully audience-tailored, and specifically arranged to serve the hosting institution’s mission: it ranges from a few hours to a comprehensive academic module. To achieve agreed-upon objectives, Massimiliano relies on theoretical sessions, multimedia presentations, and hands-on workshops for participants to address evolving digital frameworks, and assess best practices across the new digital scenarios of public, cultural and international relations communication.
Media and diplomacy have been unquestionably intertwined since the establishment of the professional figure of the diplomat: there is no diplomacy without an act of communication. Indeed, it is with JFK’s successful election in 1960 that media reached an unparalleled role within politics, as many analysts accredit JFK’s success upon his TV performance in the first debate.
By the end of training, participants will be able to (1) Appreciate the digital quality of current processes of communication; (2) Assess diplomacy in relation to evolving digital forms and multimedia platforms; (3) Properly contextualize shifting socio-political and cultural media dynamics; and (4) Define a set of best practices and take-away lessons for future use, with a specific focus on ‘smart diplomacy.’
For more information and to discuss required necessities for consulting and training, please contact consulting@massimedia.com.
Research Focus
Massimiliano posits the photograph within wider multimedia and multi-audience practices as a stand-alone communicative device, and in relation to the verbal, as a caption, and in relation to the visual, in montage. Through this, he distinguishes a phenomenological framework of analysis to urge a radical rethinking of personal and social agencies, and suggest the notion of communicative hubs for today’s globalized identities.
Massimiliano focuses on the extent to which the digital is reshaping forms of visual-led and multimedia production, knowledge distribution and media consumption to finally contextualize the photograph as ‘semantics without ontology.’ He advocates for his paradigm of the ‘Meta-Image’ and ‘Post-Produced Communication’ as two integrated formats for visual-led research, digital media practice, social engagement, and public impact specifically addressing multicultural communication.
BIOGRAPHY
Massimiliano is a digital consultant, scholar, and results-driven visual storyteller with more than 20 years of education and experience on the Muslim World. As a multimedia journalist, he worked from Morocco to China, bridging academia with the creative industries to produce multicultural communication.
After a series of collaborations for private, public and third sector assets, including IOM and UNESCO, he was awarded his PhD at the University of Exeter (UK). By contextualizing his photojournalistic practice, Massimiliano has assessed the expanding possibilities of today’s digital media, to finalize the ‘Meta-Image’ and ‘Post-Produced Communication’ as formats to develop his rooted academic research and multimedia practice.
By producing interactive narratives, Massimiliano invites audiences not only to look at, but to fully participate and hence inform his stories through their interests and contributions. Overall, the focus is not on selling ideas, but on shaping communication together with clients and audiences.
Alongside his professional consulting, he is as a senior lecturer and trainer, currently working at the Emerging Media Labs at the University of Westminster in London (UK). Previously, he has been a visiting lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London (UK), and at the Diplomatic Institute of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome (Italy).
All info and contacts can be found on massimedia.com and linkedin.com/in/massimedia.