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My name's Scott Lucas, I'm officially Professor of American Studies at the University of Birmingham.
But as an academic I've also had the opportunity to become a bit of a mischief-maker. Let me
explain. My training is in US and British foreign policy - studying it both in terms
of what's happening in history, and then what happens today. So for example I've been able
to write books about the Clinton administration, the Bush administration in the United States,
I've written about British foreign policy in the Cold War, I've written about both countries
in the Cold War. And I've written about the policies of both Washington and London and
the Middle East. I've been quite fortunate to do that here
- working not only with colleagues, but with some very, very good postgraduate students
- and then working with people from other universities who come to Birmingham toe exchange
ideas. But beyond all those articles and books I'm
able to do something else now. Because I started off as a journalist and what I've done with
the 25 years that I've been working for a newspaper, is go back and use my academic
training to support a different type of journalistic venture, so not in the US and Britain but
considering the world. Considering that events in Iran or the Middle East or China aren't
just dependent on what the US and Britain wants, but what the people of those countries
want. So this great new adventure links my academic work to a website called EAWorldview.
EAWorldview started the night before Barack Obama became President of the United States
in November 2008, and very quickly became a site beyond Obama, or Congress, or the Supreme
Court. Because we started to become a news site - we've
found that in what is called 'new media', we could actually be ahead of the BBC or CNN
in reporting what is happening in Gaza or in Afghanistan, or in Iran. SO day in day
out, if you want a different look a look behind the headlines, of what is actually happening
in these important areas, all you have to do is flip on the site and you have a tour
across the globe. Has this replaced my academic work? Absolutely not. The academics and the
journalism go hand-in-hand. We feel that we're better journalists because we can put events
into a wider context. History, politics, culture, religion, ideology. At the same time, we think
that when an academic book appears, a few months, maybe a year from now, it carries
the added benefit of our day to day observations - of seeing what has actually occurred not
from our viewpoint, but from the viewpoint of others.
Academia is not just sitting in an ivory tower, it’s not just handing down tablets written
on stone, or distributed through cyber-space - it’s actually being part of a much wider
discussion. So for that reason I'm very fortunate. At the same time that I'm working on a book
on the Bush administration and the United States, what it did with foreign policy and
the American position in the world between 2001 and 2009, I'm working on a second book,
a book about new media, including Twitter, this wondrous new thing that brings news almost
to my fingertips within minutes rather than waiting days for the New York Times or the
Times on London to hand it down. A book on new media, Twitter and the post-election crisis
in Iran. Because in that country thousands of miles from where I work in Birmingham,
thousands of miles from Washington, there are new discussions about democracy, about
justice, about religion, that do not just simply mean a threat to the West, or replace
the West, it compliments what I've grown up with and what I study day to day.
So stay tuned. Don't just check in a year from now, or a few months from now, come back
next week, because by then the news will have changed, but we'll be there along with it
- learning just as you are, studying just as you are, and hopefully spreading a bit
of that information to others around the world.