Kurt Braddock's work on violent rhetoric and stochastic terrorism was featured on an episode of YouTuber Leeja Miller's show. In the episode, Miller discusses Libs of TikTok and its connection to the deaths of LGBTQ+ people. Kurt's book – Weaponized Words: The Strategic Role of Persuasion in Violent Radicalization and Counter-Radicalization – as well as his other research on the topic, is discussed from 24:30 through the remainder of the episode. You can access the video here.
Lights, camera, action! The Anacostia Youth Media documentary program is in full swing. Mentored by SOC professor Brigid Maher and graduate and undergraduate students, they are taking middle and high-school-aged DC youth through the entire production process as they produce a documentary on the Run Hope Work nonprofit organization, an initiative that began in the fall.
Currently at the height of the production phase, the team is following the Run Hope Work cohort as they complete a job training program and certification in Anacostia and Upper Marlboro, Maryland. The documentary is set to be completed in late Summer 2024.
AU students involved in the project:
* Ethan Baker ’25 (Graduate Student, Program Manager and Producing Mentor)
* Toni DaCosta ’24 (Undergraduate, Producing and Social Media Mentor)
* Spencer Robertson ’23 (Alumni, Directing Mentor)
* Samiya Amrani ’25 (Graduate Student, Production Mentor)
* Susie DeFord ’26 (Graduate Student, Production Mentor)
* Kayeen Thomas ’18 (Alumni, Community Mentor)
Chung-Wei Huang's short film Squeegee Boy made its debut at the New York International Children's Film Festival, an Oscar®-qualifying event and North America's largest showcase for children and teen films. It won the Audience Award in the age 12-17 category during the festival's run from March 1st to 17th.
Furthermore, Squeegee Boy has been selected for the Oscar®-qualifying Cleveland International Film Festival's FilmSlam® Streams program. This selection ensures exposure to a broad audience, including thousands of students, as an integral part of their educational festival journey.
Chung-Wei was also highlighted by Maryland Film Festival as one of "Maryland's Trailblazing Women Filmmakers."
The official announcement is now out about the Dow Jones News Fund workshop bringing 10 business journalism DJNF interns to campus this summer. After training here, they intern at ASI Media, Automotive News, Bay City News, BusinessDen, Detroit News, Richmond BizSense, Royal Media, The Current, and VT Digger.
Tambra Stevenson's poster entitled "Advancing Food Democracy: The Imperative for a National Food Bill of Rights" was accepted and presented last week at the 2024 Democracy and Governance Student Research Symposium at Georgetown University's Center for Democracy and Civil Society. Posters can be viewed here.
On March 26, Professor Maggie Burnette Stogner welcomed a packed theater to the sold-out screening of the award-winning documentary “First We Bombed New Mexico.” Directed by Film & Media Arts alum Lois Lipman and featuring activist Tina Cordova, this powerful feature-length documentary spotlights the untold stories of Hispanic and Indigenous communities downwind of the Trinity bomb tests. Thousands of New Mexicans - mostly Hispanic and Native American - were exposed to catastrophic levels of radioactive fallout, never warned, never acknowledged and never helped afterwards. Generations of cancers followed. The event was hosted by AU/SOC’s Center For Environmental Filmmaking and the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital aka DCEFF. The festival continues through Dec. 30th - check out their outstanding selection of films. The events are free, but you must register: www.dceff.org.
On March 28, Maggie participated in a virtual panel hosted by New Day Films on “The Power of Advocacy in Film” as part of the Reframe & Refresh series. The panel explored how two documentary films, California’s Forgotten Children and Upstream, Downriver, have been used as tools for advocacy and change, and included Melody C. Miller, director of California’s Forgotten Children, Maggie Burnette Stogner, director of Upstream Downriver, and Dr. Angela Aguayo, Associate Professor of Media & Cinema Studies; Acting Director of the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. New Day Films' Chithra Jeyaram, Director of Foreign Puzzle, moderated.
Margot Susca presented research this week on philanthropic funding for nonprofit and for-profit news outlets at the Local News Researchers Workshop co-sponsored by Duke University's DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy and the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Her fieldwork for the research was made possible by a 2023 SOC Faculty Research grant.
Margot was interviewed by Al-Jazeera US about media layoffs and private equity. She also did the 30-minute Wisconsin Public Radio show Central Time to discuss her book and the WNBF radio show Binghamton Now to talk about Gannett.
The SOC's communications team did a story about the partnership that Sherri Williams’ class has with The Nation magazine.
Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert were interviewed about their forthcoming book The Secret Life of Data on the NPR affiliated radio show Cool Science Radio. You can listen to the interview here.
Jane Hall moderated an American Forum with veteran Democratic strategist Donna Brazile and SOC and AU students in Doyle/Forman theater about young voters and the 2024 election, including Brazile's views on why young voters should vote for Joe Biden, how the Democrats can and should respond to polls showing a loss of support for Biden among young Latino and Black voters, disaffection with both presidential candidates and the appeal of third-party candidates. Students also asked Brazile about intersectionality in politics and media and her career as the first African American woman to lead a presidential campaign. It was a wonderful, robust event and dialogue. This was a co-production between SOC and the Kennedy Political Union. We recorded, and we will be posting the whole program and excerpts on SOC YouTube and social media: look out for that! Thanks to Jacob Audoin and Tom Fish; Tia Milledge, Kati Vera, Veronica Castro and Grace Ibrahim; Fabianna Rincon and Riley Ceder; Joe Graf, Amy Eisman, Dean Leena Jaysawal, Morgan Dreibelbis, Kristi Plahn-Gjersvold, Miriem Tikue, Gerard Maguire—and professors across SOC who encouraged their students to attend.
Jill Olmsted and Jane Hall served as jurors for the Toner Prizes for outstanding investigative political journalism, named for the late New York Times journalist Robin Toner, the first woman to lead political coverage for The Times. The awards, in national and local journalism, were announced this week.
