Civic media is understood as the use of any medium to support civic engagement, ranging from video documentaries and podcasts, to games and social media. The growing ubiquity of technology in our everyday lives has situated digital media in particular, at the center of social justice movements and policy discussions such as Black Lives Matter and algorithmic racism, among many. The question of how we can better support students in becoming inspired, informed, and invited into the existing and growing space of civic media is important for Fordham to consider.
We are integrating Fordham University into the ecosystem of civic media in the U.S.. In the first step, we are working on Civic Media Workshops, which seeks to integrate civic media focused on racial justice into the curricula and student learning experiences. Each civic media workshop is facilitated by an artist/activist and focuses on a specific project and media-making approach. This project has become possible thanks to the generous grants from Fordham University’s Office of Chief Diversity Officer and the Center for Community-Engaged Learning.
Our team is composed of four faculty members in the Communication and Media Studies Department at Fordham University.
Hamidreza Nassiri is an Adjunct Professor in Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation explores the implications of digital technologies on power relations in local and global media industries, with a focus on Iranian cinema. He has published pieces on media pedagogy and has an upcoming piece in the JCMS on the stratification of film industries in the digital era. His focus is currently on social movements and the media discourses formed around them as well as grassroots and community-engaged media.
Hamidreza is also a filmmaker and community organizer. He has run several filmmaking and digital storytelling workshops for underrepresented communities and has directed several film festivals, including Wisconsin Iranian Film Festival and Midwest Video Poetry Fest.
For more, please visit: https://hamidrezanassiri.com/
Ralph Vacca (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and affiliated faculty in the New Media and Digital Design Program at Fordham University. He studies how information, design, and technology are used by youth, with a focus on how co-design can promote innovation, and address issues of marginalization in education and mental health.
Jessica (Jesse) Baldwin-Philippi is an Associate Professor in Fordham University’s Communication and Media Studies department. Her work is fundamentally concerned with how engagement with new technologies can restructure forms of political participation and ideas about citizenship. A specialist in the study of digital campaigning, Baldwin-Philippi’s book, Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford UP, 2015) investigates the digital strategies and tactics that electoral campaigns adopted in a post-Obama, social media era. She is currently working on a book about data-driven campaigning.
In addition to her work on political campaigning, she also researches how cities develop and deploy new technologies to engage with constituents and improve service delivery, and has partnered with the City of Boston and studied cities across the US.
Gregory T. Donovan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and affiliated faculty in the New Media and Digital Design Program at Fordham University. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology with a doctoral certification in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy from the CUNY Graduate Center. His research explores the mutual shaping of people, place, and proprietary media, and how to reorient such shaping toward more just and meaningful publics.
Donovan is also the author of Canaries in the Data Mine: Understanding the Proprietary Design of Youth Environments (Palgrave, 2020), co-editor of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy’s Issue 5: Media and Methods for Opening Education, a founding coordinator of the Fordham Digital Scholarship Consortium, and co-chair of the Mapping (In)Justice Symposium: Digital Theory and Praxis for Critical Scholarship.