Rethinking “hostile” environments: Integrating trauma literacy and identity-aware safety training for journalists in classrooms and newsrooms
Dr. Tara Pixley
Thursday 20 March
13:00-14:00 GMT
As risks to journalists have escalated in recent years across all reporting environments, it’s become increasingly evident that safety training must become a foundation tool provided for all journalists. Simultaneously, a recognition of how trauma is connected to news media production in various ways has spurred significant efforts in some newsrooms and journalism schools to integrate trauma-centered reporting practices across the industry.
Pulling from interviews with professional journalists and media safety trainers, autoethnography from two decades as a visual journalist and recent work as a safety trainer, I speak to how college journalism programmes and professional media industries might adopt new methodologies for holistic risk assessment and management as well as provide safety training for journalists that are identity-aware, trauma-centered and equally oriented toward everyday risks. Such changes would engender safety training that is more inclusive of all newsmakers reporting in a multitude of environments from a range of embodied experience.
Tara Pixley, PhD, is an award-winning visual journalist and Assistant Professor of Journalism at Temple University where she also directs the Master of Journalism program. Dr. Pixley’s research connects journalism studies with critical theory to study ethics of care in photojournalism and efforts to re-vision marginalized communities via the new(s) media sphere. Her visual work intersects with her scholarship and advocacy, each understanding photography/film as an opportunity to frame race, gender, climate futures, LGBTQ+ and immigrant communities through a liberation lens. She also studies anti-racism in gen-AI/synthetic media, movement journalism, climate visuals and solutions visual journalism. She is a Fulbright Specialist in visual media, and has previously been a Reynolds Journalism Fellow, Pulitzer Center Grantee, an awardee of the World Press Photo Solutions Visual Journalism Initiative and a Knight Fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Newsweek, ProPublica, The Atlantic, HuffPost, Nieman Reports, Visual Studies, History of Photography, Visual Communication Quarterly and The Black Scholar, among many others.