Meredith Clark, Ph.D. is a 2023-2024 Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Rebooting Social Media (RSM) at the Berkman Klein Center. She is currently the Director of the Center for Communication, Media Innovation and Social Change and an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. Dr. Clark is an expert on Black Twitter and her research focuses on the intersections of journalism, digital communication, and race.
As a current student at Northeastern and a young woman of color and student journalist majoring in Communication Studies, my conversation with Dr. Clark about her hopes for her RSM project, her professional background, and her identity as a Black woman was not only informative, but inspiring.
What are you hoping to accomplish during your time at RSM?
I have wanted to work with the Berkman Klein Center for a number of years, and seeing the call for RSM really excited me because, having studied Black Twitter for over 10 years now, I've been really disheartened at where social media has gone and there are a number of, for me, unanswered questions that need more time than I can give them in most of my capacity. One of those questions is about how Black women are positioned online and why the framing, or the understanding, or the positioning of Black women is so essential to understanding how misinformation and disinformation flow and work across different cultural groups. I think about how people think about who Black women are, how Black women show up in society, and why it's so easy to mischaracterize us. And I think that digging into that question is essential to understanding what sort of challenges we're going to be up against with misinformation and disinformation in an increasingly digital future.
I read an older Knight Foundation report on the shortcomings of mainstream media in covering Black, Feminist, and Asian American communities. As a lot of news outlets are laying off staff, particularly their journalists of color, how can outlets improve on covering these marginalized communities?
That’s another big question. I've written about and have been thinking about reparative journalism as an approach to reporting that centers vulnerability and vulnerable people and makes that the place that journalism operates from. I think that in doing it, news media can better cover structurally marginalized communities.
So for instance, one thing I'm looking at even within our systems at Northeastern, on Microsoft Teams, you can see a number of incoming students are chatting with each other. And there are a lot of international students who are talking about the difficulty in getting their visa and getting housing. You take something like a reparative journalism lens, putting structural vulnerability at the center of it. What does immigration policy, for instance, look like to a person who is coming to study on a particular visa, a visa in many cases that has recently been the subject of political play and posturing? What are their experiences? What information do they need in order to make sound decisions for themselves, their communities, and their families? I use that story to sort of illustrate what reparative journalism might look like. It is something that can be done, even in the absence of some of those reporters of color. The problem with that is, not having direct links to the communities that you want to cover well is always going to result in a gap in how well you're able to tell a story.
You have a background as a journalist, professor, and scholar, and you're also a Black woman. How have all of these different identities helped you in how you investigate or look at topics?
There are experiences and perspectives that I have and have had in the past that just mean I see things differently. Because I am a Black woman, I have seen what it's like to be discriminated against. Because I'm from the South, I have had some experience with what it's like to live through the history of places like the South (I was raised in Kentucky). All of that, for me, just helps me to see another layer of some of the problems that I like to investigate in my research.
So, I pursued journalism because as a kid, I was super nosy, and I'm still super nosy. But my parents had significant mistrust of the news media, and for good reason. They had seen how the news media mischaracterized them, mischaracterized people in our neighborhood, mischaracterized their experiences growing up. Both of my parents lived through the Civil Rights Movement. They were both born in the 1940s and they lived through all of that as young people, young adults, and so they had this deep mistrust of news media.
And when it came time for me to enter the profession, I had a very different orientation to the profession than those people who say, “journalism is a tool of democracy and it champions the cause of the weak and it’s a voice for the voiceless.” And that was one of the things that stood out to me because, unless very specifically speaking, a person does not have vocal ability, everyone has a voice. The problem is, who is heard, who actually gets listened to, and whose voice gets amplified. So, it’s that perspective that has influenced everything I've done.
Interviewer
Pratika Katiyar is a research assistant with the Berkman Klein Center’s communications team and a leading Gen Z free expression activist. She is an honors student on scholarship at Northeastern University majoring in Communication Studies and Business Administration with a concentration in Finance.