Research Philosophy

In my first year as a journalist in my hometown of Sacramento, the deadly 2018 Camp Fire broke out and razed the town of Paradise, California, a town that I had also lived in for a few years in my childhood. I received a call in the newsroom from a nurse named Tamara, who was one of the last individuals evacuated from the hospital in town. Tamara, her patient—a woman who had recently given birth—and a couple of EMTs escaped down the only two-lane road out of town that was engulfed in flames on both sides. Fearing access to the highway was blocked, they spotted a house that had been spared because the owner, who had evacuated hours before, had left several hoses on the roof and around the lawn. They pulled off the highway and sheltered in the house for hours until firefighters could come and safely escort them out of town.

Tamara told me her story and that she was searching for the homeowner who saved them. Toward the end of her call, she said, “I don’t know why I needed to talk to you. I just needed someone to tell someone my story.” A day later, I was able to track down the homeowner and reunite Tamara, the patient, and the homeowner in front of the house that saved them.

Tamara’s words became a guiding memory for me through my career as a journalist and digital media strategist and now serve as part of the inspiration for how and why I do academic research of journalism and the real-life narratives we tell. Thinking of the power storytelling had for Tamara during one of the most traumatic moments of her life, I asked myself a question that has become the central thread in my research: What is the purpose of stories in a society constantly in crisis?

Media in our modern society acts, in sociologist James Carey’s words, “as the maintenance of society in time.” The narratives we tell within media are the ways a society dialogically passes down histories, builds metaphors to convey values and morals, and creates meaning around the chaos of daily events. My aim in journalism and media research is to understand the meaning-making utility of narratives and the role that journalism plays as the self-appointed arbiters of society’s collective memory. My research sits at the nexus of three areas: exploring journalism and media through a cultural lens; understanding narratives as a constructive, meaning-making process; and bridging communications research with multi-method, participatory action research methodologies.

Communication as Culture
Communication is not just a transmission of information from one person to the next; it is a ritual of cultural storytelling (Carey, 2009). When we tell stories through media, we relay the narratives of who we are as a society and what we know. However, society is not monolithic. Subcultures upon subcultures exist in our intersectional lived experiences. Rather than passing down oral histories, we now store representations of these lived experiences—both real and fictional—printed on paper, exposed on film, and coded on hard drives and servers. It’s through the cultural critical analysis of the stories we pass down and the ways we imortalize some stories over others, that help us paint the intricate portrait of our understanding of ourselves. 

Meaning-Making through Alternative News Narratives
We are storytelling animals: homo narrans (Fisher, 1985). Not only is storytelling a cultural ritual, but it is also a cognitive process that imposes meaning on the world around us. Some of these rituals are exalted above others, as historical research on journalism as a normative institution has shown (Vos, 2017).

One way we can paint a more holistic, 360-degree perspective of reality is by examining alternative news narratives in addition to dominant narratives. In my work, I primarily examine “alternative” news outlets and the ways they do journalism differently both in their practice and in their storytelling.

Humanizing Journalism Research
Research in the Western tradition of academia has a history of extractive practices, just as many institutional journalistic practices have been extractive. Both fields have a duty to reveal truth but neither should do so to the detriment of those they are obligated to inform. By focusing on desire-based research practices (Tuck, 2009) and participatory action research methodologies (Paris & Winn, 2014), I engage in multi, mixed methods research that aims to both humanize the research process and engage in research with communities as a co-participatory, liberatory practice. Using principles of PAR, my research bridges advancements across other disciplines with communications research and asks how journalism and the process of storytelling can be a healing interaction for both journalists and the communities we report with.

Research Awards

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Carey, J. W. (2009). A cultural approach to communication. In J. W. Carey (Ed.), Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, Revised Edition (pp. 11–28). Taylor & Francis.

Fisher, W. R. (1985). The Narrative Paradigm: In the Beginning. Journal of Communication, 35, 74–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1985.tb02974.x

Paris, D., & Winn, M. T. (2014). Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities. SAGE Publications, Inc.

Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review, 70(3), 409–540. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15

Vos, T. P. (2017). The Paradigm Is Dead, Long Live the Paradigm. Journalism & Communication Monographs, 19(4), 307–311. https://doi.org/10.1177/1522637917734216