The 2018 AMIC Award for ‘Transformative Leadership” has been accorded to Fr. Franz-Josef Eilers, svd at the 26th Annual Conference of the “Asian Media, Information and Communication Centre (AMIC)” on June 8, 2018 at Manipal ‘Academy of Higher Education’ in Karnataka, India “for his outstanding contributions in the field of Church and social communication”. He has “written extensively on human and social communication and developed the concepts of pastoral and evangelizing Communication” which is also reflected in an academic program at the Pontifical University of Santo Tomas in Manila. His several books in the field are considered as standard in the field, including a 632 page commented edition of all official Vatican documents on Communication from 1936 to 2014 (Logos, Manila).
AMIC is since the 1970s the only professional continental organization for Asian communication scholars and professionals which since 2006 gives only one annual Award to outstanding figures in the field. The last former awardees were Shelton Dhavalasri Guanaratne (2016) who is recognized as proposing a “de-Westernizing” communication theory especially under Buddhist but also Hinduism and Confucianism perspective. The 2017 Awardee Wijayanada Jayaweera was leading the “International Program for the Development of Communication (IPDC) at UNESCO in Paris and developed a “human-centric theory of Press freedom” based on Daoist principles.
Original article at St. Joseph Freinademetz Communication Center, Inc. website.