The world’s first mega event in the COVID-19 world, the Dubai Expo is here with its main theme as connectivity. The expo provides an opportunity for people and countries to come together and foster greater understanding and trust.
*****
Professor Jay Wang is an associate professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. He’s also leading the Center on Public Diplomacy as its director. He explains the significance of the Dubai Expo, what it means for an in-person engagement. And what lies in the future to foster greater understanding and trust?
JAY WANG: First of all, the expo in itself is an important cultural phenomenon. The expo, as a mega-event, is different in the sense that you meet people in person and to engage the public in a face-to-face direct sort of a platform becomes — in an interesting way — more important now than than before. Now secondly, in Dubai, this is a first time for this event to take place in the Middle East and if, without the pandemic at the Dubai Expo, would be attracting the most international visitors ever in expo history just because the location of Dubai. And so this expo, the theme is connectivity, and then it’s expressed through, you know, the sub-themes that you just mentioned: sustainability, mobility and opportunity. And I think many pavilions try to integrate these themes into the presentation and how that connects to the national promotion. And then in some ways is how do you, for instance, define your national identity or your national and now national brand through issues of global concern and light system sustainability?
Professor Mina Chow is an eminent architect. She looks at expos through the prism of architecture. She shares how expos should remain apolitical, and practices such as public diplomacy should remain far from misinformation and expos enable that.
MINA CHOW: Now, I have to mention that Her Excellency Reem al-Hashimi — she is the director general of the Expo 2020 Dubai, and she she’s also the UAE Minister of State for International Cooperation. She said this. There’s a feeling of celebration that is shared among a community of nations, and there are not many places where you can feel a sense of community among these nations. Expos are supposed to be a political in nature, and they should be a true celebration of him human ingenuity, the human spirit, human collaboration and building partnerships. So that pretty much sums it up. Been hearing for a very long time about like one of them was the UK Pavilion. They were using technology. And so what they said was that a lot of the the way that they designed it was to find a way of connecting to people through the haptic sensory dimension, which is what I believe is important to connect to people, right, which is through the body and through movement of the body. And so what they did was that that pavilion captures the movement and the voices of the visitors as they move through the pavilion and they turn it into the sound waves of people as they talk and walk into an audio poem. And so that becomes a sense of a sort of sensory engagement with what’s happening in the pavilion itself. The U.S. Pavilion, which — it’s actually addressing the themes of mobility by showing the promise of space travel.
One of the things that it’s forgotten public diplomacy is this idea of tactile in real life engagement through the elements that architects use to influence people. So they are very much they lead to lasting memories. This real in real life engagement, if you talk to anybody that’s been an expo, they often will never forget their experience. And one of the other important things about the sorry public diplomacy is that it must be optimistic. It has to be the truth. Absolutely. It can’t be misinformation. It can’t be disinformation. If it’s public diplomacy, it must be factual and it must be optimistic. So there’s a lot that can happen when you use sensory engagement with architecture and creative excellence to bring that sense of optimism.