Who We Are
The Center for Border & Global Journalism was created at the University of Arizona to bring greater focus to the challenges facing journalists and other communities, everywhere, as they engage a more globalized and more perilous world.
Working with academic departments across campus, the U.S. and the world, and leveraging the work of the UArizona School of Journalism faculty along the border with Mexico, other parts of the Americas, as well as the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia and other regions, the CBGJ develops and engages in new programs, research, educational partnerships, trainings and shared initiatives.
To advance those ambitions, the center draws upon the School of Journalism’s long-standing and new relationships with several other units and programs on the UArizona campus, including:
- Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice
- Arizona Center for Turkish Studies
- Center for Latin American Studies
- Center for Middle Eastern Studies
- College of Education Borderlands Education Center
- College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Mexico Initiatives
- Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry
- Department of East Asian Studies
- School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies
- School for Government and Public Policy
- UA Libraries
- Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy
In the years leading up to the founding of the CBGJ and in the years since its 2015 inception, our faculty, graduate students and research and outreach associates have collaborated and partnered with other groups and organizations outside the university, including:
- Americas Research Network (ARENET)
- Binational Migration Institute
- Border Journalism Network
- Consortium for North American Higher Education Collaboration (CONAHEC)
- Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma
- Freedom House
- Freedom of the Press Foundation
- Institute for International Journalism
- Institute for War & Peace Reporting
- International Center for Journalists
- Internews
- Investigative Reporters and Editors
- Nogales Community Development
- Nogales International
- Press Club, Kolkata
- Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
- Sri Lanka Press Institute
- The New York Times
- The Associated Press
- The Solutions Journalism Network
Our faculty also have partnered with colleagues at universities around the world, including faculty at:
- American University of Iraq, Sulaimani
- Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte (CISAN) UNAM
- Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, A.C.
- Hadhramout University, Yemen
- Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication, George Washington University
- Nangarhar University, Afghanistan
- O.P. Jindal Global University, India
- Sri Lanka College of Journalism
- Surendranath College for Women, University of Calcutta
- Taiz University, Yemen
- The Times School of Journalism, New Delhi, India
- UNAM-Tucson Center for Mexican Studies
- Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Toluca, Mexico
- Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Mexico
- Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City
- Universidad Mayor, Santiago, Chile
- University of Miami, School of Communication
- Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas
- Universidad Veracruzana
- University of Aden, Yemen
- University of Saba Region, Yemen
Dr. Celeste González de Bustamante is director of the Center for Border & Global Journalism, and Dr. Jeannine Relly is director of global initiatives.
What We Do
What can we do together – as professionals, researchers, educators and advocates? How might we help journalists and support media professionals to meet the challenges of a world where information moves at the speed of light and often is manipulated, removed from sight or overtly censored?
Importantly, how do we better train, prepare and safeguard their work when journalists are now more often regarded as targets, not only by terrorist organizations, militias and organized crime groups, but repressive governments and powerful business interests? Since the early 1990s, well over a thousand journalists have been killed, and many more kidnapped, detained or driven into exile, simply for asking to know the truth.
These are difficult realities, and much is at stake. On a visit to campus in 2015, Diane Foley, the mother of the slain journalist James Foley, said that “we all need to be aware of what is taken away from us” when journalists are killed or threatened with kidnapping and harm, and whole parts of the world are shut off to the independent scrutiny that journalism provides.
Digital communication has made our world more accessible but less comprehensible than ever. At the Center for Border & Global Journalism, we endeavor to make the world a safer place for journalists and communities around the world through research, reporting, training, and collaborative educational initiatives.