The strategic research grant enables us to develop our own collaboration, and to build a larger initiative involving colleagues from New York City, Mexico City and Montreal project on issues of crime and security in relation to media and public culture in North America. . This proposal grows in part out of a panel at the March, 2006 conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, on which Carrie Rentschler and Will Straw presented papers on crime and media, alongside Dr. Graciela Martinez-Zalce from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and Dr. Aurora Wallace, from the School of Communications and Culture at New York University. We wish to build on this collaboration and create a coherent research area, centred at McGill, dealing with issues of crime, security and media. We see the creation of this research area as proceeding through several steps, of which the panel in March was the first.

The grant allows us to undertake the following activities over the coming year:

- organization of a public colloquium and research workshop on the theme of crime, media and public culture. For this we would bring Dr. Martinez-Zalce and Dr. Wallace to Montreal, and invite local scholars with interest in these areas.

- preparation of papers from this event for publication as a dossier or special issue within an international journal. Editors from both Space and Culture and Public culture have shown tentative interest in reviewing the essays from the March panel together.

- preparation of larger research projects and funding applications to build a research concentration, within the Department, on crime, media and public culture. As yet, no communications department or program within Canada has such an emphasis.

For information on the international symposium on Crime, Media and Culture, click here