Nancy Snow is an international specialist in public diplomacy and propaganda studies. She is Pax Mundi Professor of Public Diplomacy at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. Snow co-edited a seminal textbook, the Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, with leading propaganda scholar Philip M. Taylor. A tenth-anniversary second edition will be published with co-editor Nick Cull at USC in 2019. Snow is Professor Emeritus of Communications at California State University, Fullerton where she taught American media history and philosophy, persuasive communications, persuasive writing and speaking, and global communications. Snow has held several adjunct professor positions, including at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism where she was the principal faculty involved in the establishment of the Center on Public Diplomacy. She also has taught graduate-level public diplomacy and marketing foreign policy as a senior adjunct faculty affiliated with the Interdisciplinary (IDC) Center Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy in Herzliya, Israel. She is the author/editor/co-editor of eleven books, including the Routledge Handbook of Critical Public Relations, Propaganda and American Democracy, Persuader-in-Chief, Citizen Arianna, Information War, and Propaganda, Inc., the latter two published in multiple languages. Snow is a former Presidential Management Fellow (PMF) in the Clinton administration where she served at both the United States Information Agency and US Department of State. Snow held a two-year visiting professor appointment at Syracuse University’s Newhouse and Maxwell Schools where she worked with public relations faculty to expand a dual degree master degree in public diplomacy. Her recent focus has included teaching and consulting in public diplomacy studies through visiting professor appointments at Tsinghua University’s School of Journalism and Communication in Beijing, China, and the Institute of American and Canadian Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. Snow is a two-time recipient of a Fulbright Award (Germany, Japan) and a US Speaker and Specialist in Public Diplomacy for the US Department of State and US Embassy in Tokyo.
Award Information
This project focuses on Japanese public diplomacy in the aftermath of 3/11. It uses a top to bottom assessment of data collected from media sources, in-house documentation and face-to-face communication with executives involved in official Japanese public diplomacy management as well as grassroots "citizen diplomats" whose actions are challenging conventional top-down style management of diplomacy to publics. This research is a continuation of the author's work in rethinking the public's role in public diplomacy. Data is collected from the perspective of key influencers inside eight selected governmental and nongovernmental organizations working directly and peripherally on Japan's nation image management as well as from publics on the ground—including anti-nuclear power activists--who are challenging the Japanese government's legitimacy and credibility in the post-3/11 era. The study will utilize an ethnographic methodological approach to data collection, employing both primary and secondary sources of content material (speeches, press releases, news coverage and criticism), organizational site visits, interviews with principals, and interviews with public citizens to address the dynamic of rethinking the public's role in public diplomacy after 3/11. The study seeks answers to key policy-related questions of who will lead in Japan's new public diplomacy, and how this leadership is projecting its goals and objectives onto the Japanese public, in the Northeast Asian region, and globally. This project begins with two questions: first, how are these Japanese governmental and nongovernmental organizations projecting their agendas to domestic and global publics in the post-3/11 era? Second, how are the rise of anti-nuclear protests in particular, and citizen democracy in general, affecting Japan's public affairs and public diplomacy goals and initiatives? This project tests two different philosophies about public diplomacy. One philosophy holds public diplomacy as the official domain of experts and leaders, with outreach to publics as a necessary evil at worst, or an ancillary tactic, at best, designed to reinforce conventional or traditional public diplomacy objectives. The other philosophy holds public diplomacy as an environment, milieu, or context for the ways in which nations and their citizens interact with each other from the top public affairs officer to the grassroots level of citizen diplomat.
