Alum Khadijah Costley White’s Multimodal Research on Active Shooter Drills
A leading voice in community-engaged scholarship and multimodal research, Annenberg alum Khadijah Costley White (Ph.D. '13) recently shared her work on student and teacher experiences of active shooter drills in her immersive, scholarship-driven and scholarship-producing art installation, “This is Not a Drill,” and as the speaker at Annenberg’s 2025 Annual George Gerbner Lecture in Communication.
The project, both artistic and academic, explored the negative impact of active shooter drills on students, parents and teachers. “While there has long been multimodal work in media and communication, in recent years, we’ve seen much wider shifts in formally embracing public scholarship and nontraditional knowledge production,” said Costley White. “And in our field, a lot of the leadership and multimodal scholarship has been happening right here at Annenberg.”
During the lecture, which has been held annually since 2006 to honor Ambassador Walter and Mrs. Leonore Annenberg, she discussed how her multimodal work intentionally intersects with her exploration of power in her more traditional scholarship on media and politics, such as her book “The Branding of Right-Wing Activism” and a co-edited collection, “Media and January 6th.” Just outside her lecture, her installation, “This is Not a Drill,” had participants confront a series of wooden boxes, each with only a button inside. When pressed, they were plunged into darkness and immersed in tales of shooting drills told by teachers and students reacting to them within their schools, an experience far different from reading a research paper.
Costley White began this project outside of any research institution. As an activist, she started SOMA Justice, a community nonprofit that often uses narratives and storytelling to help people understand how race, inequity, and power function in our society. Their work has paid off school lunch debts, supplied resources to food-insecure families, offered emergency loans to community members, helped create the first suburban police review board in the state, and provided water safety skills to neurodivergent and non-traditional learners, among other impactful initiatives. Both community advocacy on policy and education on complex social issues are central to the group’s efforts.
One of the first things that mobilized SOMA Justice to act around safety and policing in schools and brought Costley White’s attention to the subject, and ultimately inspired “This is Not a Drill,” was the school district’s plan to use the popular active shooter drill training program ALICE, which has been rolled out in schools across the country.
Local kids and families shared that the drills already in place were deeply traumatizing and unhelpful. Research showed that such drills offered no clear benefit in improving safety, and ALICE, in particular, with its heavy links to law enforcement, was described by participants as unhelpful, hyper-realistic and dangerous. When her local school district was considering a contract with ALICE, Costley White and others in SOMA Justice successfully worked to prevent it.
This kind of activism is directly linked to her academic work. Her use of alternative research practices and nontraditional forms, including interactive media projects, prioritizes accessibility, democratic deliberation, community participation and public service. She won a Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship that supported the project and allowed it to come to fruition. During the lecture, she spoke passionately about how combining research with practice serves to enrich the other, offering new ways to engage communities and foster democratic dialogue around urgent policy and social issues.
“As I’m continuing to expand my work focused on publicly-engaged research in media and communication, the talk provided a wonderful opportunity for me to share and discuss my research and ideas with both my colleagues and the very people who trained me,” said Costley White.
