A moment from my interview with Dr. Josefina Tinajero (right) on October 12, 2012, at Education Building, UTEP. (Herman Delgado/Social Justice Initiative)

Building Bridges: Internship at Media Changemakers shows me a way to connect the academy and the community

Just change: media, stories, and actions

By Moushumi Biswas

EL PASO – As a journalist-turned-academic, I was at a vantage point last fall when I decided to intern with the Media Changemakers (MCM) as its Media and Communication Specialist. On the one hand I was an outsider, a media professional who had years of experience in communicating with the community as a reporter and photojournalist; on the other, I was looking at the community from the point of view of the academy. Thus, I was able to straddle both sides as I worked with the MCM, an interventional platform of the Social Justice Initiative (SJI) of the University of Texas at El Paso’s Department of Communication. Dr. Lucia Durá was my mentor and Dr. Arvind Singhal and Bobby Gutierrez, my co-mentors. This internship was part of my Community Literacy Internship service-learning class, which I took in the fall as part of my doctoral coursework in Rhetoric and Composition.