Center for Media at Risk Symposium Explores How Media Can Be a Resource for Resistance, Creativity, Community, and Hope

"Beyond Endurance: Reimagining Media Praxis,” organized jointly by Annenberg doctoral students and alumni, featured a keynote and three panels exploring different dimensions of media praxis. In a moment marked by political upheaval, environmental catastrophe, and intensifying threats to media workers and scholars worldwide, the question of how to approach media scholarship and practice felt more urgent than ever.

The Center for Media at Risk, which will sunset on June 30, 2026, has empowered scholars and media practitioners for nearly a decade to identify conditions that undermine free and critical media practice worldwide and to strategize ways to respond to these risks.

“What made this symposium especially meaningful was the way it brought together our extended community to reimagine how we approach mediamaking,” said Barbie Zelizer, Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Center for Media at Risk Director. “So much of media work today is about survival: staying safe, staying funded, staying visible. We wanted to ask a deeper question: how do we move beyond survival toward transformation?"

The two-day symposium featured a keynote address by André de Quadros, professor of music and music education at Boston University, and three panels examining how media can serve as a practical resource for resistance in an increasingly unstable and unequal world.

Drawing from personal experiences as a refugee, de Quadros addressed the impact of media in shaping migration narratives in his keynote and highlighted the erasure of indigenous and marginalized knowledge due to colonization and industrialization. He emphasized the importance of storytelling to foster empathy and resistance, and called on media scholars and practitioners to wield its power to confront violence, promote radical hope, and challenge systemic injustice.

After the talk, former Center for Media at Risk postdoctoral fellow and music scholar Perry B. Johnson conducted a dual Q&A session between de Quadros and Wayland "X" Coleman, an incarcerated artist, activist, and organizer who was a former student of de Quadros in Boston University’s Prison Education Program. de Quadros expanded on his pedagogy, and Coleman discussed the challenges of sharing stories with the media while incarcerated.

The three panels for the symposium were:

“Witnessing” — featuring Sandra Ristovska, J. Siguru Wahutu, and Richard Stupart. Ristovska (Ph.D. '16), Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, discussed how AI-generated media could be exploited to incriminate and further marginalize racial and ethnic minorities. Visiting scholar J. Siguru Wahutu, Assistant Professor of Sociology and African Studies at Yale University, analyzed how African conflict is depicted in the Western press as “spontaneous eruptions of violence” rather than outcomes of global imperial entanglements. Former postdoctoral fellow Richard Stupart, now Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool, explored the ethical responsibilities of scholars and journalists in witnessing and reporting injustices, encouraging witnesses to record atrocities so no one can “scrub the record of what was done.”

“Materializing” — brought together three Annenberg alumni whose work bridges scholarship and creative practice. Roopa Vasudevan (Ph.D. ‘23) discussed her journey from art school to academia, emphasizing the integration of creative practice in her Ph.D. at Annenberg. She advocated for self-publishing as an alternative to traditional academic publishing, citing her own zines and risograph prints as examples. Antoine Haywood (Ph.D. ‘24) shared insights from his project, “Telling Our Stories: A Multimodal Philadelphia Community Media Storytelling Project,” which paired oral history stories of media makers at Philadelphia Community Access Media (PhillyCAM) with portraits by Annenberg Digital Design Specialist Kyle Cassidy. Azsaneé Truss (Ph.D. ‘25) discussed her research examining how conspiracy theories in Black American art are rooted in critical histories of racialized oppression and how she expanded on written research through the visual arts. 

“Sustaining” — focused on the challenges of maintaining ethical, community-centered media practices. Visiting practitioner Arwa Mahdawi, a journalist at The Guardian, discussed the concepts of perspective and objectivity in journalism, critiquing the lack of credibility given to Palestinian voices in mainstream media and emphasizing the importance of community and solidarity in journalism. Former postdoctoral fellow Samira Rajabi, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, shared her experience with symbolic trauma, discussing her research on digital fitness spaces and the impact of debility and alum Muira McCammon (Ph.D. ‘23), Assistant Professor of Communication at Tulane University, detailed her use of Freedom of Information Act requests to uncover government erasure and misinformation, emphasizing the importance of transparency and accountability in research.

The symposium concluded with remarks from Zelizer and the symposium organizing team,  emphasizing that media research and practice, at Annenberg and beyond, can be a force for transformation in the world.

“Though media sadly remain at risk everywhere we look, I am proud that the Center's ongoing activities helped both illuminate the threats obstructing free and critical media and chart possible pathways for the resilience of media practitioners and scholars,“ Zelizer says. “I am grateful for the opportunity to have made a difference, and especially grateful for the Center’s community of scholars, advocates, media practitioners, and friends.”