ABIDE committee selects student and faculty projects for 2024 grants
The UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media’s ABIDE (Access, Belonging, Inclusion, Diversity and Equity) committee recently announced its 2024 grant recipients. With funding going toward initiatives ranging from a book club to the development of an international reporting course, these grants will allow students and faculty to pursue diverse projects both in and outside of the classroom.
“These grants are vital for Hussman’s work to support diversity, equity and inclusion by ensuring that our students have access to a wide variety of knowledge sources in media and journalism spaces,” said UNC Hussman Dean Raul Reis. “Empowering students, faculty and staff to pursue projects and research that contribute to that work is an invaluable addition to our school.”
With ABIDE funding for a Student Organization DEI Event, UNC Hussman doctoral students Heesoo Jang and Jessica Shaw will host a book club, in which interested students, faculty and staff will read Geeta N. Kapur’s “To Drink from the Well” that explores the University’s history around race and civil rights.
Book club participants will join Robert Porter, a teaching assistant professor in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies for the “Black and Carolina Blue” walking tour of campus that highlights the lesser-known histories behind important campus landmarks. Shaw said she hopes the book and the walking tour will provide a foundation to discuss what diversity means for UNC Hussman and the larger UNC community.
“It's the first step — reaching an understanding of educating yourself of how we can play a part in improving things, and making better choices, or being more inclusive, or being more open,” Shaw said. “I think that when you're teaching or when you're in school as a student, you get caught up in turning in papers and all this other stuff that you don't always get the time to stop and think about that.”
Lindsey Williams, a UNC Hussman master's student, applies a similar attitude to her research on how and why thought leaders post about DEI issues and topics on LinkedIn.
With her DEI Research/Professional/Creative Grant, Williams will provide an incentive and compensation to leaders participating in her project, which is especially important to her because talking about DEI topics can be sensitive.
The culmination of her project will be an exploration of the communication strategy and best practices she finds by talking to these leaders.
“I am hoping to better understand how leaders can create cultural change on social media in the professional and business space, which is why LinkedIn is the platform I am studying,” Williams said. “There is limited amount of research related to thought leader strategies for social media, and with the DEI issues relevant to today, it’s really important that leaders create space for dialogue and activism.”
Sarah Whitmarsh, a doctoral student, also received a DEI Research/Professional/Creative Grant to further pursue her research on anger activism. Using the grant, she’ll be able to obtain a more representative sample in her experiment exploring advocacy campaigns in the reproductive justice movement.
“Researchers have long known that feelings of anger and efficacy, or belief in one’s ability to create change, drive people’s engagement in political and social activism,” Whitmarsh said. “But there are some newer ways to segment audiences and test those effects — whether people might be more willing to donate to a cause or call their legislator about an issue, for example, based on their underlying beliefs and the type of message they see.”
Teaching Assistant Professor Nazanin Knudsen was awarded funding from the DEI Guest Speaker Fund to invite Michael Anthony Betts — a sound engineer, producer and educator — to speak with her “MEJO 333: Video for Marketing and Public Relations” class.
Betts will expose students to practical audio and voiceover techniques using professional equipment, under a teaching philosophy committed to DEI recognition.
“As a person of color who teaches skill courses, I know it is challenging to be seen and recognized. I want my students to meet and be inspired by exceptional professionals of color,” Knudsen said. “I am grateful to receive the ABIDE funding because it allowed me to offer my guest an honorarium — a small step in promoting and fostering a more equitable work culture.”
With her grant from the DEI Conference Travel and Professional Development Fund, Assistant Professor Erin Siegal McIntyre plans to travel to Tijuana, Mexico, to begin laying the groundwork for the development of an immersive international reporting class that’s accessible to all UNC Hussman students.
Siegal McIntyre hopes the course, framed around journalistic principles for both cross-cultural reporting and human rights reporting, can travel to Tijuana over spring break to produce projects based at the United States-Mexico border.
"The chance to bring an opportunity for students to go abroad to widen perspectives, widen horizons, change up the way we look at the world and our place in it — these are such transformative and meaningful experiences,” Siegal McIntyre said. “Not only is it important to understand and be able to responsibly and sensitively report on communities and people and institutions and practices that are different from everything you might know, it’s also really important to become situated as a citizen of the world and not just as a citizen of the United States.”