“Narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society. It is simply there, like life itself.” -Roland Barthes
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 post-partum woman named Tamara, who was one of the last patients evacuated from the hotel in town. Tamara, her nurse, 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.
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.” I promised her that I would try my best. A day later, I was able to track down the homeowner and reunite Tamara, the nurse, and the homeowner in front of the house that saved them.
Regardless of the broadcast our station produced about Tamara’s story, her quote became a guiding memory for me through my career as a journalist and digital media strategist and has now inspired how and why I do academic research in media and journalism. 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 journalism 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 program sits at the nexus of three areas: engaging with communication, journalism, and media through a cultural lens, understanding narratives as a constructive, meaning-making process, and engaging communications research in 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 story-building and storytelling (Carey, 2006). Communication through media relays the story 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 News Narratives
We are storytelling animals: homo narrans (Fisher, 1984). Not only is storytelling a cultural ritual, but it is also a cognitive process that imposes meaning on the world around us. Taking a qualitative approach to the integrated community storytelling network framework (ICSN; Kim & Ball-Rokeach, 2006; Wenzel, 2023), I primarily examine “alternative” news outlets and how their journalism practice differentiates these newsrooms from institutional or legacy newsrooms. I especially explore the ways that alternative newsrooms integrate themselves into communities as storytellers, and how the perspective of journalists as a storytelling community of practice changes the journalist’s embodied role in a community.
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 (PAR), I aim to be a multi, mixed methods researcher whose research both humanizes the research process and engages in research with communities as a co-participatory, liberatory practice. Using principles of fully engaged participation, change-oriented action, and rigorously ethical research in journalism studies ensures that the harms of the status quo will not stay the status quo forever, 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
Carey, J. (2009). Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Routledge.
Fisher, W. R. (1984). Narration as a human communication paradigm: The case of public moral argument. Communication Monographs, 51(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637758409390180
Gottschall, J. (2012). The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Tuck, E. (2009). Re-visioning action: Participatory action research and Indigenous theories of change. The Urban Review, 41(1), 47–65. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-008-0094-x
Wallace, L. R. (2019). The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity. University of Chicago Press.