Berkeley Talks: #SandraBlandMystery: Aaminah Norris on the transmedia story of police brutality
“A lot of the work that I do is helping people to understand that they have a responsibility to disrupt media messages and not just consume,” Aaminah Norris, an assistant professor in education at Sacramento State, tells Berkeley professor Abigail De Kosnik.
July 5, 2019
(Photo by Meg via Flickr)
Aaminah Norris is an assistant professor at Sacramento State in the College of Education. She has more than 20 years of experience supporting schools and nonprofit organizations in addressing issues of educational equity for low-income students from historically marginalized communities. She researches, teaches and advocates for the use of digital and social media in formal and informal learning environments to address racial and gender inequities.
Aaminah Norris is an assistant professor at Sacramento State in the College of Education.
Norris, who received her master’s degree and Ph.D. in education from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, sat down with Abigail De Kosnik, an associate professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, in April 2019 to discuss transmedia storytelling, police brutality against women and girls of color and the essay she co-authored, “#Sandra Bland’s Mystery: A Transmedia Story of Police Brutality.”
“A lot of the work that I do is helping people to understand that they have a responsibility to disrupt media messages and not just consume,” Norris tells De Kosnik. “You can’t just be thoughtless consumers of these things that reinforce bias against a group. And if you are doing that, then you can potentially be causing harm and putting people in danger.”
This conversation was featured in De Kosnik’s online course Performance, Television and Social Media. It was designed and produced in collaboration with Digital Learning Services.
- Related reading: Read a 2017 Berkeley Blog post by Stephanie Jones-Rogers, professor of African American studies, “Police shootings: How many more must perish before we see justice?”