People
Jessica Bal
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Jessica (Jess) Bal (she/her) is a researcher, educator, and photographer pursuing a PhD in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research focuses on documentary ethics, histories of photographic illusion, and emerging imaging technologies. A former journalist, Jess is also currently working on a community memory project and digital archive about labor organizing in U.S. newsrooms. Jess is a 2025 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellow.
The ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship allowed me to continue working on a digital archive called Solidarity TK that aims to tell the story of the last decade of labor organizing within New York City-based news publications. This is a project that originated in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (ITP) program and continued through a Social Practice CUNY fellowship last year, so it’s truly been boosted and pushed forward thanks to multiple CUNY support systems.
Heading into the summer, I had completed interviews with 10 participants from places like The NewsGuild, The New York Times, Insider, Law360, Consumer Reports, Gawker, and others. I photographed a range of objects from those organizers (everything from pins, t-shirts, posters, and tattoos), and began designing an Omeka archive to house the interviews and images. I was reminded (again!) that projects like this often take more time to complete than we anticipate, especially when we prioritize the process and participants themselves. I had hoped to get to the stage of facilitating one or two story-gathering events—where I envision inviting journalists to interview each other and archive their objects on site—but transcribing, sorting, and getting feedback on existing material has been an extensive step. I decided early on with my project advisor Pennee Bender that I wanted to make the editing and publishing process a shared one; stories will only be made public after interviewees review materials. As someone who used to work in the journalism industry, I’m still always learning how to move at the speed of trust rather than a news cycle.
So I transcribed and revisited, listened, sorted and organized. I had the words of participants echoing in my head throughout the summer, a season that, for me, was also infused with more forays into community organizing and solidarity outside of the research realm. As I absorbed political education in multiple forms, I felt the quotes and poignant moments from these conversations with organizers solidifying into something more tangible and embodied. I was reminded of how these shifts in how we show up for each other and build root networks happen through one-on-one conversations (something many interviewees emphasized).
I’ve been calling Solidarity TK a “community memory project” because it lives somewhere between the space of academic research and artistic/journalistic practice for me. I am finding myself drawn to creating within these in-between spaces, where I think we can reach different publics, sometimes across industries, communities, or disciplines. I’m grateful for the support to work in that way. Heading into the fall, I feel excited to launch a version of the archive once participants can reflect on their own interviews, and to experiment with even more collaborative ways to gather and share these stories.
