Week 43 is officially the Global Media and Information Literacy Week (24–31 October) coordinated by UNESCO. The topic of this year’s edition focuses on digital platforms, with the title “Media and Information Literacy in Digital Spaces: A Collective Global Agenda”. The global MIL week is an annual theme week on the United Nations calendar, with an intention to celebrate and draw attention to the promotion of media and information literacy (MIL) around the world. National and regional activities take place in all continents.

The international main conference was supposed to take place in Amman, in the Dead Sea region of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, but because of the turbulent situation in the region it was postponed to a later date. The plenary sessions and side events are already planned.

Making a decision on postponing or cancelling a conference is never a happy moment, especially after a period of long and careful planning. We may, however, feel comforted by the fact that, as every year, there are local MIL events taking place. Every year, UNESCO invites all MIL actors to plan and register local events and activities on the official Global Media and Information Literacy Week 2023 website. At the national level in Sweden, the Swedish Media Council encourages MIL actors in its MIL network to arrange events. The Gothenburg region hosts a regional MIL actors’ network, and the coordinator, Region Västra Götaland (Västra Götalandsregionen in Swedish), has collected some regional events to this page.

However, the coordination and exchange of ideas is not restricted to one specific week, but MIL researchers, practitioners and promotes are keeping contact very intensively at all levels, from international to local, throughout the year. I myself have been involved in the international organizing committee of the global MIL week this year and last year, when the conference was organized in Abuja, Nigeria. I have also co-led the UNESCO MILID University Network that typically hosts a side-event in the MIL week conference. Currently, I’m representing Northern Europe in the regional chapter of the UNESCO MIL Alliance (former GAPMIL) and co-editing the UNESCO MILID Yearbook 2023. The global connections benefit the work at the national, regional and local level, as well as inserts ideas into the academic research.

Personally, I’m celebrating the global MIL week by giving lectures – almost one each day. I began last Friday, when I delivered a keynote lecture to an Asian media and communication conference on artificial intelligence (AI) pedagogy in journalism education, based on the recent UNESCO handbook, and my week will end on Saturday with the Amelia Murdoch lecture on language revitalization of Finnish in the context of media and information literacy in Sweden.

P.S. Besides as the UNESCO Global MIL Week, week 43 is celebrated as the International Open Access Week by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), European Week for Safety and Health at Work by the European Council, and Giellavahkku, the Sámi Languages Week by Finland, Norway and Sweden.