JR 653 - Community Storytelling

Credits: 4
The best reporting and storytelling today focuses on revealing truths about a community. To do that, journalists must build trust and work with community members to tell stories about social issues of our time. This course introduces students to participatory design and action research as a method for learning to work with communities in creative ways to offer solutions to vexing issues. Students delve into the ethical challenges specific to community storytelling, including consent, representation, and the impact of biased narratives and tropes on marginalized groups. Students engage with communities via social media and learn to use ethnography, observation, narrative inquiry, systems analysis, cultural artifacts, in-depth interviews, and other practices that introduce students to the core principles of civic media, public and political art, theories of democracy, social movements, and governance.