Project title: South African Museum of Storytelling: Mass Media & the Struggle Against Apartheid
Project description: Engaging Archives is a (soon-to-be) public resource on South African heritage developed by Professor Grant Parker. This suite of projects seeks to promote engagement with historical sources and to connect scholars, heritage professionals and creative artists with a broad public around questions of heritage, history and collective identities.
As a part of this project, I am working with fellow CCSRE scholar, Emily Ocasio, to research mass media coverage of the South African anti-apartheid movement. Past scholarship indicates that news coverage of protests against the status-quo is disproportionately negative, focusing on the spectacle of violence and arrests rather than meaningfully engaging with protestors' demands. In our research, Emily and I are studying whether this phenomenon, known as the "protest paradigm," applies to coverage of the anti-apartheid movement. To this end, we are using Natural Language Processing to review thousands of news reports in several major publications between 1970 and 1995. The results of this study will inform our understanding of how contemporary social movements are portrayed in the media.
In addition to this research we are developing a digital museum curation on the relationship between news media and the global movement against apartheid. We will conduct interviews with anti-apartheid activists and reflect their testimonies on Engaging Archives.