Keeping critical thinking alive: Interview with Elizabeth Fox

Abstract

We conducted an interview with Elizabeth Fox (1947), -one of the pioneers in communication research in Latin America-, with the aim of recovering and highlighting her academic trajectory from her early arrival in Colombia in the mid-sixties to her recent works. Fox unfolded her own intellectual biography while simultaneously contributing to the establishment of a field of study focused on mass media, their concentrated structure, inequalities in the circulation of international flows, U.S. penetration, and national and regional communication policies. She is not only the author of numerous publications -either alone or in collaboration with Luis Ramiro Beltrán or Héctor Schmucler-, but she has also been a great organizer. At a time when everything was “just beginning,” her work also aimed to bring together many other researchers from the region, so that they participated in emerging institutions, and to promote collaborative research to develop and maintain critical thinking.