Kamal Sinclair conducted more than 100 interviews for Making a New Reality, a series Immerse published in 2017–2018. Now, two years later, we are thrilled to launch a new toolkit based on her important work.
With Making a New Reality: A Toolkit for Inclusive Media Futures, Jessica Clark and Carrie McLaren have updated and supplemented Sinclair’s original research with recommendations and resources to help readers further diversity, equity, and inclusion in emerging media.
The project is available as a free PDF download or a beautiful, print-on-demand book. The Making a New Reality website also offers a few excerpts, as well as direct links to resources featured in the book’s solutions.
As Clark writes in her foreword, quite a bit has changed in this short time: The pandemic. Protests over police violence. New, rising concern over social media, algorithmic oppression, and mental health. So, correspondingly, we made quite a few changes:
We took the insights Kamal gleaned from her interviewees and research, and reorganized them around three key targets for action: things that each of us can do to increase equity in emerging media, ways that institutions can pitch in, and systemic interventions — which require collaboration across institutions, sectors, and governments. For each of these sections, we did original research to add resources designed to help readers get a better grasp on each recommendation, and find ways to move forward.
We also stepped back and took a deeper look at what we meant by “equity” — not just in terms of race, but gender, class, religion, ability, and ideology.
We hope all of our readers share this work and its long list of resources with your networks and contacts. And, as always, we welcome your feedback.
Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.