Public Affairs Media Study
As part of a research project supported by the CUNY Adjunct Incubator, Anita Cheng, an Adjunct Associate Professor at Hunter College and Brooklyn College, CUNY is designing public interest graphics about current legislative issues before the New York City Council to be shown on broadcasts, events, and social media platforms with parallel goals of public application for civic education processes, and curriculum development.
We are in a new era where elected officials who are actually writing the laws that affect us can engage in direct-to-the people communication. Media creators will help shape this civic landscape. Cheng believes it is crucial that we lay the groundwork for academic institutions, educational research, and the students themselves to be engines driving social media public policy communication innovation, not only commercial or political special interests.
This project builds on Cheng’s ongoing research and work with elected officials, and begin the process of developing animated, graphic micro-messages—prototype brief capsules of public policy information to be delivered from these lawmakers themselves directly to the public as GIFs and video clips. The project hopes to create topic templates that can be adapted and reused by local policy makers as issues and platforms evolve.
This project is part of the CUNY Adjunct Incubator and is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
