IDEA Initiatives and Partners

The Critical Media Project (CMP)

Led by Professor Alison Trope, the Critical Media Project is designed to serve high school instructors and other educators who seek to incorporate media literacy into the classroom. The site contains a wide range of media artifacts that explore the politics of identity across issues of race and ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality. 

DiverSCity

DiverSCity is an editorial project from Annenberg Media that aims to document what it's like to go to one of America's most diverse universities. 

Azteca America Partnership/Grant on Social Media Storytelling for Latino Audiences

This is a course taught by professors Amara Aguilar and Laura Castañeda and research initiative led by Sangita Shresthova and Taj Frazier exploring Spanish-language television industry, digital media and changing media landscape, as well as Latino young adult audiences' media preferences and platform usage.

The Annenberg Anti-Racism and Communication Working Group

Graduate student and faculty research group exploring role of communication, critical theory, digital archives, and new media in struggles over representation, equity, and injustice.
 
Interdisciplinary Research Initiative on "Race, Class, and Aesthetics in Urban Placemaking (RAP)"

This is a three year grant and research initiative (2016-2019) awarded via USC Research Collaboration Fund that will explore how communities of color are using the arts and creative urban spatial practices to re-imagine and secure their place in the city on their own terms. The elements of the proposed initiative will build faculty knowledge of case studies and an inter-disciplinary framework from which to form collaborative research projects and community partnerships. Led by principal investigators and USC faculty Annette M. Kim (Price School of Public Policy), François Bar (USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism), Robeson Taj Frazier (USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism), and Holly Willis (USC School of Cinematic Arts), this group of 18 USC faculty is an effort to establish a growing network of faculty across campus who are eager to bring attention to these issues and to develop research projects and classes in order to find emancipatory ways forward. 

Summer Institute on Difference in Media and Culture
This week-long institute brings together exemplary doctoral students and faculty members from across the disciplines of Communication and Media Studies and around the nation to discuss issues of race, gender and difference in media, within the shifting conditions of technology, production, circulation and consumption as well as the shifting discourse of difference in the areas of politics, culture and globalization. Speakers in the workshop sessions examine race, gender, and difference in the media from a variety of interdisciplinary and methodological perspectives.

NPR Next Generation Radio
This is a series of one-week student radio training projects co-sponsored by NPR member stations and several journalism and media organizations.The projects are designed to give students who are interested in radio and journalism an opportunity to report and produce their own radio and multimedia stories. Teaching sessions touch on several areas: recording techniques, writing, voice and on-air presentation, social media reporting and audio production. link: 

Annenberg Summer Youth Academy for Media and Civic Engagement
This partnership with Annenberg Connects offers a three-week summer intensive for talented high school students from from the communities surrounding the USC University Park Campus and Health Science Campus. Taking the equivalent of first year college level courses, these students develop a rich conceptual understanding and practice of the necessary role that media communications and journalism must play in fashioning civic-minded thought leaders/innovators, and moreover public spheres organized around democracy of thought, identities, and resources. The academy strengthens the students' skills of writing, critical thought and thinking aloud, public speech and debate, multimedia production, interviewing and ethnography -- essential competencies required for excellence in and out of the classroom in the 21st century. The students are also introduced to Annenberg’s undergraduate programs and services and careers in media and journalism, as well as exposed to the school's innovative scholars who are advancing issues of race, gender, and ethnicity in communication and journalism communities of practice.