As the newest center within the College of Arts, Media, and Design, CCMISC is a research, teaching and communications hub that applies a four-pronged approach (experimentation, creation, intervention and preservation) to disrupt historically dominant power structures in media and communication. In its second year, CCMISC will expand its community-focused work.
Led by Dr. Meredith D. Clark, an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Department of Communication Studies, CCMISC counts faculty and graduate students among its members, and welcomes individuals from Roxbury and surrounding areas to join its Community Advisory Council. CCMISC also welcomes interest from local residents and Northeastern students, faculty, and staff on our campuses across the United States and throughout the world.
CCMISC is guided by three statements of core values:
- Collaboration and collective inquiry
- Work that is historically informed and futuristically oriented
- Projects defined as audacious experiments
During the 2023-24 academic year, CCMISC will lead programming crafted around the theme of “Care & Repair.” This theme puts CCMISC’s values in dialogue with work about restorative justice, feminized labor, and critical care infrastructures. Our theme is also designed to help members identify connections among individual projects and offer a shared frame of reference for the CCMISC community’s work for the academic year.
CCMISC will continue to fulfill our values through the establishment of the community advisory board, the further development of a community-centered communication grant program, keynote events in the fall and spring, and a series of monthly “Critical Conversation” panel events to connect graduate students with the change-makers & communicators within their advocacy fields of focus.
Center members are engaged in an array of individual and collective projects, including an investigation of how news media erases women from its visual narratives; a study on the impact of efforts to diversify food journalism; the preservation of Black digital culture, and the creation of an audio storytelling training program designed to equip young women in the Boston area with skills to write, edit, and produce their own narratives.
Meet the Team
Dr. Meredith D. Clark, Director
Meredith Clark is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and the Department of Communication Studies. She is also the Founding Director of the College of Arts, Media and Design’s Center for Communication, Media Innovation, and Social Change. Her research focuses on the intersections of race, media, and power in digital, social, and news media, and is informed by the years she spent working in newsrooms as an editor, editorial writer and columnist.
Her manuscript We Tried to Tell Y’all: Black Twitter & Black Digital Resistance is under contract with Oxford University Press. Clark’s academic research has been published in Communication & the Public, Communication, Culture & Critique, Social Movement Studies, Electronic News, and the Journal of Social Media in Society. She is the academic lead for Documenting the Now II, a project supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that helps community-based activists create and maintain digital archives of their work.
Prior to joining CAMD, Clark was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and a 2020-2021 faculty fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute.
Claire Ogden, Communications Specialist
Claire Ogden (she/they) is the Communications Specialist for the Center for the Arts and the Center for Communication, Media Innovation, and Social Change. She holds a BA in Anthropology and Media from Brandeis University. Outside of her work at Northeastern, she is a freelance arts writer and nonfiction film producer/curator.
Evelyn O’Donoghue, Administrative Coordinator
Evelyn O’Donoghue (she/they) is the Administrative Coordinator for the Center for the Arts and the Center for Communication, Media Innovation, and Social Change. She graduated from Mass Art in 2022 with a degree in fiber arts, and her artwork has been exhibited at Boston Sculptors Gallery.