A journalist and researcher who uses her craft to foster racial justice has made history at Michigan State University.
Danielle K. Brown is the 1855 Community and Urban Journalism Professor in the School of Journalism. In June, she was recognized as the Early Career Scholar by the International Communication Association (ICA). Brown is MSU’s first recipient of this award, which honors a scholar no more than seven years past receipt of their doctoral degree. The recipient’s existing body of work must contribute to knowledge of the field of communication and show promise for continued development.
Brown, who is the founding director of the LIFT Project (Leaders Invested in Fostering Trust), was a strong contender.
“The LIFT Project focuses on trying to attack disinformation and misinformation about black communities by creating new tools for journalism and newsrooms,” Brown said. “We work with communities around the Midwest to help understand their needs and desires around news and information and the spaces in which they think journalism might be able to bring news to them where they are. From there, we audit news coverage and identify spaces where journalism can fulfill the needs of the communities that are underserved or underrepresented.”
The project started in Minneapolis. It was there that George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was killed by a white police officer on May 25, 2020. The incident captured global attention as one of the most shocking and high-profile cases of police brutality in years.
Brown moved to Minneapolis just a week later.
“After his murder, I was thinking about narrative change around protest, because that's what my core research was about for many years,” Brown said. “I realized that traditional training to fix the problem wasn't going to actually work very well, and so I was inspired to think more radically about our orientations for change in media and to center communities when trying to make a difference.”
Brown’s interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship focuses on the cross-sections of journalism, political science and sociology. She specializes in analyses of media representations and narrative change, social movements and activism and identity and political psychology. Brown has published dozens of articles in top-tier journals, and her work also appears in popular media outlets like the Nature, Scientific American, Nieman Lab, Columbia Journalism Review and The Conversation.
The ICA selection committee judges an early career scholar candidate on the “strength of their published work, including its conceptual foundation and argumentative clarity, on the scholar’s productivity at a given career stage, on the rigor of the research produced so far, and on the promise of existing work serving as a springboard for continuing scholarship.”
“It’s a really fierce competition, and that that makes it pretty dizzying in my mind to know that I got it because people just do amazing work,” Brown said. “For me, to be able to have my work recognized at this level is something I never expected. As most people who study race and racism know, it's a difficult subject to approach personally, but it’s also difficult to publish about it. So, it’s an honor to know that my work made an impact.”