Inclusivity in Media: A Conversation with Dr. Nicole Haggard

We all consume media entertainment. How does that entertainment shape our perceptions of women and people of color?  In today's episode, you'll meet Dr. Nicole Haggard, who is an award-winning instructor, speaker, and published researcher with 16 years of study about the intersection of race and gender in American culture. In 2018, Nicole co-founded the Center for Intersectional Media and Entertainment — CIME — an organization dedicated to advancing representation.



CIME’s primary goal is to transform our collective relationship to the stories we are all watching. In conversation with Lee Schneider, Dr. Haggard discusses the data behind CIME’s ideas, how it uses pop media culture to get the ideas across, and the audience it is working to reach. On screen, only 33% of the characters in speaking roles are women. And behind the scenes, only 17% of them are women in key production roles. Dr. Nicole Haggard discusses how representation behind the scenes drives representation on screen, what needs to change, and how CIME, the Center for Intersectional Media and Entertainment, can make change. She also has some best-practices suggestions for movement building online.

Red Cup Agency produces the FutureX Podcast for FutureX.Studio. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and join our newsletter, 500 Words. Give us some stars and post your comments on Apple Podcasts and we’ll give you a shout out on the show.

Learn more about CIME: https://www.cime.us

Creators & Guests

Host

Lee Schneider

Artistic Director of FutureX.Studio

Guest

Dr. Nicole Haggard

Co-Founder of CIME

What is The Future Lab with Lee Schneider?

What if we simply stopped trying to predict the future, based on various passive indicators, and simply seized the future as ours, and shaped it into what we need it to be?

Upcoming seasons of the podcast will cover how to envision cities in the future so that they, and we, evolve and thrive.

Past seasons of the podcast have covered indie publishing and book marketing. The episodes are an open conversation about how to create online communities that are diverse, welcoming, and safe. In each episode, Lee Schneider interviews a platform creator, an author, or publisher about their projects and the communities they are building online.

0:00:03 - Announcer

This is the Future X Podcast. In each episode, we interview a platform designer, author or publisher. They’ll talk about how to build online communities that are diverse, welcoming and safe. Now here’s your host, lee Schneider.

0:00:17 - Lee Schneider

Welcome everyone to the Future X Podcast. I’m Lee Schneider. In today’s episode, you’ll meet Dr Nicole Haggard, who is an award-winning instructor, speaker and published researcher with 16 years of study about the intersection of race and gender in American culture. In 2018, nicole co-founded the Center for Intersectional Media and Entertainment. That’s CME, an organization dedicated to advancing representation. We’re going to talk about her experience, with her co-founders, of creating and sustaining CME. Nicole, welcome to the podcast.

0:00:54 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

Thank you, happy to be here.

0:00:56 - Lee Schneider

So first let’s start at the beginning. What is CME?

0:01:00 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

What is CME? That’s a great question. Cme is an organization that works in a couple different ways, but our major goal is to transform our collective relationship to the stories we are all watching. We’re all consuming media. We’re all consuming entertainment media. We really want to advance the conversation of what does that look like on screen and how does that impact us as people.

So in order to do that, we have to work with what we call our 5As, which are audience members right, it’s like all of us consuming activists, who are people who care about representation and the issues about representation and are doing that work. We work with academics who care about research. We work with allies in the industry, so folks that are wanting to make a change, and then we also work with artists, so be like content creators. And so for us, it really is the combination of the 5As that come together in different ways that we’re able to do the work that we do, and sometimes that looks like a research project. We just finished a huge research project with Amazon Films and the C Change Institute. Sometimes that looks like a workshop. So we do Hollywood, white Supremacy and Me. That was for allies who wanted to learn how to do better work we do talks all over the place, so we’re really involved in a really intersectional approach to just getting our message out there and getting content creators and audience members to think differently about what they’re producing.

0:02:26 - Lee Schneider

Now the obvious question is why? Why did you start doing it and why do we need to do this?

0:02:32 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

So my PhD is at a cool intersection of critical race theory, women’s studies and film studies. So I had always been deeply rooted in the data of what’s going on on screen. Knowing that women are only 33% of the speaking characters, right, Like data like that would just shock me. But then also learning that women were so underrepresented behind the scenes. So then we also make up like 17% of the key roles in production, too, behind the scenes. And so there’s this really clear connection between the people who are working on these projects and then the content that we’re getting. And so when I started working at Mount St Mary’s University, they do the report on the status of women and girls in California and they asked me to put out the data for what’s going on for women in the entertainment industry. And so I put out that data just gave you some of the stats there, right. And I started going to all these events and people would just spout the data without any context, right. And it became super clear to me at all of these huge women’s conferences, women’s events, all of these things women in entertainment they weren’t talking about how this impacted us as people, right. Like what does it feel like then to be the only woman in the room Because that’s usually the experience and the only woman of color or the only person of color, right, Like how does that feel to walk into that room and try to make change and what is that making? Like what does that do to you as a person, right?

And so I was like I think there’s a big call for us to gather and I started having what I call the women in Hollywood circles, and so they were four women who were working in the industry and we would get together almost like an AA meeting, right, and like just talk and I would do some grounding exercises. And a lot of people were like this is like church for my career, you know, and they feel so isolated and alone, and so it was great to come together and share the experience of what they were going through. So I started doing those on my own and then I was nominated as one of 50 women changing the world in media and entertainment for the way that I bridged academia and activism in this space of women in entertainment in Hollywood. And through that I met Joy Donnell and Munika Le, my two co founders of CME, and they just thought that that personal level of what I was doing was really interesting and we loved the intersectional approach.

Like I’m an academic, Munika is a studio executive, Joy is an author and a producer, we’re all activists in our own right, in our own different ways, and so we were like let’s come together and bring all of these different perspectives together to create some change. So it really was grounded in that need for creating data with soul. Like what is the human element to these numbers? Right? Like the data is speaking truth to the power. But then what do we do with that and what do we do about that? And so, coming from our three different perspectives, is what really sort of like bolstered CME and got it going?

0:05:38 - Lee Schneider

Great. So a lot of questions here. Let me try to start at the beginning. Yeah, people behind the scenes and people and what we see on camera, behind the scenes, what we see. Maybe a lot of us aren’t thinking about the relationship there, the direct relationship Like if it’s all a bunch of white guys in a room. You get a certain kind of entertainment. That’s what shows up on Netflix, Is it true? And how does the constitution of the writer’s room of the producers, how does that change what we actually see on screen?

0:06:14 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

So let me pull up the exact stat for you. The Center for Study of Women in TV and Film puts out their studies every year Martha Lausen is an incredible researcher who does this and they have reported, right, that there is a direct connection between the roles of women you see on screen and the people working on those films. Right, so in films with at least one woman director and or writer, females will comprise 56% of the protagonists, right? But in films with exclusively male directors and or writers, females only account for 23% of protagonist. So, really, what that is showing us? That that including even just one more woman behind the scenes increases the visibility and quality of the female characters on screen.

So, over 30 years, really, like when we’re looking at this data, not much change has happened, and really, the numbers of women behind the scenes peaked in 2018 and then has started to go down again, and so it’s really frustrating when we know that even just having one more person in those rooms, right, increases not only the likelihood of there being a lead female character, but also the quality of that character. Like, what are they going to be talking about? Will the female character, will the film even pass the Bechtel test? Right, like can you have two women talking to each other at the same time? There’s all of these different like layers, like we could talk about age, we could talk about race, we could talk about if they have a job, if they’re even seen doing that job.

It can go in so many different ways, but really what it comes down to is a lack of female characters on screen, a lack of them actually having speaking roles, and then, when they are on screen, they’re extremely one dimensional and their most valuable contribution is to the other male characters. What are they doing for them? How are they advancing their storylines? And I think that’s where the real problem is. It’s in the imagination of the people who are creating this content, and so it just like you were saying it’s like common sense, right. Like if they’re not there, then the imagination is limited, and we do see that as a direct connection.

0:08:40 - Lee Schneider

Movies, tv, their delivery systems for ideas, and sometimes the creators of those decide you need a Kevin Costner, a white dude, in there to be part of that delivery system, otherwise they assume it won’t play, it’s not going to work. But obviously what you’re saying is we need to question this. We need to question these systems of delivery of these ideas. So let’s turn that around a little and ask OK, see me, we described a little bit what it does and these are important, world changing ideas that you’re talking about, but how do you get them across?

Yes, the numbers, the numbers are great, but, as you said, you know, people need stories, not just numbers, and people need examples about themselves, not just numbers, and people need to kind of talk this out on their own in groups sometimes and I’ve seen some things on see me, on LinkedIn and other kind of live streams, sort of things where Just people get to talk about movies, which people love to do. So I’d probably the number two thing first talk about myself, talk about movies. You know that’s what most people like. Why did you choose that kind of conversational let’s talk about, let’s get at the popcorn? Why that? Why do that?

0:09:56 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

So a lot of it also comes from my background, right, and one of my favorite thinkers is Bell hooks, and she has this piece called movie making magic and she talks about there’s nothing more powerful than cinema to really teach us about race and gender and sexuality, like it is the ultimate teacher, right, and it’s teaching you constantly in ways that we don’t even acknowledge. So there’s that right. There’s like, yes, media is one of our primary socializing institutions and we need to acknowledge that, and so it’s. That’s an easy source. And then to gosh, like everything we learn about who we are, who other people are, how to argue, how to love, how to do anything. Right, we’re learning from the movies and, like you said, people love talking about it. So, because we have this rich data at CME, right, we have the research from from my dissertation that really looked at the production code era, which was the rules of what could and could not be in the movies, and we have all of this other data that we produce, right, that gives us this modern view. So what we discovered, and what I discovered, was that through these rules, they created cinematic segregation, right, and there were rules about who could be on screen together at the same time. So, for example, there was one of the rules was the miscegenation clause, which forbids sex relationships between the white and black races, and what would happen is you would submit your script to the production code administration and tell them like what story you wanted to tell, right, they would write you back and they’d be like okay, you can do this, you can’t do this, take this out, keep this in right. Or they would straight up say nope, sorry, this is to, goes too much against what our rules are. Right, and they were really attempting to forestall state censorship at the time, or federal censorship of movies. Right, because at the time we didn’t have freedom of censorship for cinema. It was declared a business and so it wasn’t an art form and so they were liable to censorship. So they were really attempting to forestall that. So they were playing this game of like including content that they felt like people would be okay with seeing and Forbidding content that they feel like would be controversial. But when you say they, who are you talking about? You’re talking about cisgendered white folks. So there was the rule about homosexuality. They called it sexual perversion, but that was forbidden, right, and so there’s a whole work called the celluloid closet. That really explains the history of that. So at see me, we kind of do what celluloid closet differ homosexuality for race and gender, right, the intersection of race and gender.

To really show, how did the production code era, which was this 30 year period in early Hollywood, create this level of common sense of what people were want to see on screen and what they don’t? And it defined what success looked like right? And so, for example, there was a group of theater owners I think they were from South Carolina and they wrote to the production code and they said look, we only want to see movies that have white people and what they called Negroes at the time in movies together. If the Negroes are in servile positions or or personal, like all of this stuff you’re doing, with black and white people dancing on camera together, people having relationships, friendships, work relationships, we don’t want that and we’re not going to show your movies. What I think is important to remember is that things would not be banned, things would not be forbidden, things would not be censored if they weren’t being put in front of us in the first place or if people weren’t trying to make this content in the first place. So it really is this period of silencing that happened. And so, at see me, we like to acknowledge something that George Lipset says, which is the stories we tell are the stories that sell, right, but if we don’t acknowledge that we censored what we could tell in the first place, then we keep telling the same stories of what we decided could be told right. So if the stories we sell are the stories we tell, then that means that stories we tell are the stories that sold, but we don’t acknowledge that we censored what could be told in the first place.

And when we share this history with folks getting back to your question about how do we do this, right? So there is this element of like I’m so excited to talk about. What I’m watching is everybody’s favorite thing to talk about, and then we share a little bit of this history and for so many people it’s like oh my God, I’m not crazy. I’ve never seen myself on screen and I thought that was because I’m not worthy, but it’s really because there’s this long history of Hollywood censoring what could be on screen. And what’s fascinating is the folks working in Hollywood now don’t even know about this history either, right, and they are just going off assumptions of what could sell.

It’s all about comps. If it’s sold before, it’ll sell. Now Give me a comparison. Right, you want to make your movie. Tell me that it’s like Forrest Gump meets Harry meets Sally, like what is the comp that you’re giving me? And so if there are no comps, there’s this way that, like, it won’t get made and it won’t push through, even though it is the stories that people so desperately want and need. So I think that sharing the history, giving a little bit of historical data to a little bit of historical context to the data, and then also, like I started in the beginning, right, what is the human element to the data? It’s that full circle that really helps people get it and transforms the way they watch. I had this experience in my classrooms where people were like I can never watch movies the same way again. You’ve ruined me forever. This sucks and it’s amazing, right. And so we really wanted to have that impact on everybody so that they would consume differently.

0:15:56 - Lee Schneider

It’s a lot about, or in part about, breaking these feedback loops. Yeah, how do you make this a popular concept? How do we get audience members not only thinking about this but also asking for Change? So they’re breaking the feedback loop. How do you reach people?

0:16:16 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

So how we do it is by taking what people are watching now right. So we have those conversations with folks like what are you binge watching?

You know, and a lot of times that ends up being something on Netflix, right, that they’re binge watching, and, depending on what the content is, right, we’ll ask them oh, are there any female characters in that? Right? Or, starting from the question of what’s your favorite movie? Right, do you see yourself in that movie? It’s really just connecting the dots for people of does what they’re seeing on screen Reflect the real world they live in or the real world that they want to see? And we have been so Conditioned, that’s. I mean, that’s why movies are so great, right, like they take you into this fantasy place and you You’re just like whoo, they wash over you and you’re in the world of the movie and sometimes your critical brain stops working. But once you just like, point one thing out to them, depending on what it is they’re watching, right, and. And they’re like, oh, wow. And then they can never watch the same way again.

Once you tell somebody, hey, did that thing you love past the Bechtel test, well, now they’re always gonna notice if something passes the Bechtel test, right, and think about the implications of that. So to us it’s like the power of the data with soul, right. It’s like, oh, just poke a hole in something and then let’s keep talking about it. So now you’ve noticed that there’s no female characters. Well, now are you noticing, like, what those female characters you’re seeing are doing, right, and sometimes there’s like additional layers of Intersectionality to this.

Like there’s this big movement right now for white women to be like heroes, right, and to be these like badass women on screen who are like solving problems and doing all these things. And we don’t want to be vulnerable and at home and in our feelings, we don’t want to be saved, right, it’s this feeling of like we don’t need a man to save us. And then you get black women coming along and they’re like yo, it would be so nice if someone could save me, right, like I am constantly out here. The characters that I am are like these really strong women Doing things, and I just want to be like emotional and vulnerable and saved. And so it’s also like when are these layers of intersectionality that show up in the representation, that show up in the data that can really allow people to talk about the patterns of representation that they’re seeing on screen? And so we give you a little hint of what those patterns are and then people apply that to their personal lives and Really have a deeper conversation with us and your audience, curating your audience.

0:18:59 - Lee Schneider

Obviously, when you say to someone do you see yourself on screen or you know, or does this pass the Bechtel test?

you’ve chosen, or people have volunteered, perhaps To be that audience to talk to and I’m asking this question because I’m thinking of people who might want to start their own Organizations or who are building their own gatherings and communities, sometimes online and curation finding the people is not only key but can be really hard. It can be difficult because you have to reach outside your own Associates. You have to reach outside your own bubble because you want diversity. That’s it makes it better. So how are you doing that? What do you do about that?

0:19:44 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

so for us, we have a really easy topic, right. I mean, it’s people love watching, about them, talking about the movies, right, and so that’s a way that we are able to draw people in, just simply based upon whatever piece of content that we’re talking about. But I think that’s relevant to any Group that’s attempting to form a community. First it’s like what, what is the thing you’re actually trying to impact, and Then where is the popular culture Connection to? That is a great way, in both social media and LinkedIn and you know all of these different platforms, and To get a broader audience paying attention. And I think, because I did film studies, I just got that so naturally.

But other people are coming at it a different way and they end up at film studies, right. So other people are like what I really care about is this. Maybe it’s police brutality, right, and I’m trying to create a community around police brutality. Well, the way that we portray Policing in cinema is a huge issue, right? Color of change is doing studies on this, norman Lear Center is doing study on this. So there is always a way that, like, the way the thing you care about is portrayed or being talked about will show up in popular culture, and I think grabbing those popular culture moments that you care about is a great way to to bring people into your conversation and so like.

For example, we’re working with a project right now that’s focused on women in STEM and really advancing the movement for women in STEM, and so part of what we’re doing is pulling all the examples of what’s going on in popular film and television right now that’s related to characters of women in STEM. Is this like? What do you think about this character? What do you think about this character, right? What do you think about this moment that’s happening? So I think that’s a super easy way, right, that you can curate content and draw people in for your audience. Yeah, that’s great. Pop culture powerful vehicle.

0:21:43 - Lee Schneider

To get at least get people’s attention. Yeah, you can get that right and that’s what we find. Like it’s people love.

0:21:48 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

Like you said, people love talking about what they’re watching, you know, and so where can you pull that in to your conversation and get people to see the thing you care about?

0:22:02 - Lee Schneider

What are your must-haves for a community of people? Let’s say we’re building a movement. You’re building a movement, so you probably face this all the time. Who are the people I want? Listening to me, and why? And do I need diverse people and where do they come from? And where is it about the power center people or is it about the popular people? Who will give this voice, who will carry this forward? I know it’s a big question, but I’m sure you’ve thought about it.

0:22:34 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, for us there’s two things that I’ll talk about. So one is like that idea of diversity in the first place and then like who do you need at the table? So and both of these are framework shifts, right? I think, when you are deciding what you’re doing, like what is your entry point, what are the assumptions you’re bringing about, who is your audience, who are your people in the first place? And I think this word like diversity is getting thrown around a lot and we need to really like tune into what do we really mean? So often in our industry and I’m sure this relates to other industries diversity means including one person who is in a white male at the table, and now that person is diverse. Not us as a community are diverse, right? So that’s the first. We as a community have to be a diverse. A person is not diverse. A group of people is diverse, right? The second piece of it is like what is diversity anyways? And in American culture we have boiled that down to literally your phenotypes. What do you look like, right? If somebody looks different from me, then we’ve created diversity. But if you can easily poke a hole in that as well and I’ll give you an example.

I had an assignment in one of my classrooms. It was a journalism classroom, and so they had to kind of like when we’re, when you’re in elementary school and you’re picking teams, right for your kickball or whatever, right? So they had to. They had team leaders and they had to pick teams and create the most diverse newsroom, right? So how would you do that? So we had two team leaders and they were picking teams, and so one team was me, an older white lady, a first generation young girl from El Salvador, and then a girl who was she was Korean and Mexican mixed, right? And they were like oh my god, y’all, y’all are the most diverse group, for sure, right? Well, turns out, we all grew up in the San Fernando Valley and two of us went to the exact same high school. So when it comes to diversity, we weren’t that diverse, right? We all thought the same, we talked to the same, we grew up with, really like we had the same teachers teaching us. But if you’re looking at us, just about what you’re looking at, we looked the most diverse.

And so we challenge people to think of diversity on multiple levels, right? Not only is it the obvious ones we think about a lot which be like race and gender and sexuality, but what about age? What about religion? What about income status? What about education? What about who you grew up around, right, like I grew up in really having a lot of interracial friendships, interracial relationships, and because of that I was so aware of my whiteness and how my whiteness changed in different contexts depending on who I was around and where I was going. I think that’s like a gift that a lot of white folks don’t even see their whiteness as a thing, right? But because I grew up that way, then I see my whiteness in that way. So having me and another white person is actually interesting. That doesn’t mean we’re not diverse, right? So really, you know, questioning what does diversity look like, based on different life experiences and how you formed as a person? For whatever, the issue is that you’re trying to address, right, and really reframing your idea of what diversity is.

0:26:00 - Lee Schneider

That’s a really great point and one that I am thinking about and need to think more about.

0:26:05 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

Thanks and okay. So the other piece of it is like who do you talk to? Is that what you’re asking, like, who?

0:26:10 - Lee Schneider

do you?

0:26:10 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

need at the table.

0:26:11 - Lee Schneider

Who do you need at the table is a good way to do it.

0:26:14 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

So I think our the way that see me formed is actually a great example of this, right? Because what we saw was industry folks are talking to industry folks, right? They’re like, what is the problem in the industry? How do we solve this industry? Then I was an academic and I’m like I have all of these friends who are like writing amazing work and, you know, like digging into aspects of representation that they really care about and mapping the historical trajectory of this representation, but they’re not talking to industry people, right? Then you have, like my social justice friends who are like we need to change representation. This is why, right, like it’s so interesting, people are from different industries talking about the same thing, but they’re in their silos, right? So for me, you, what we call it is the five A’s, right? So it’s like you need the academics, you need the activists, you need the artists, you need the people in the industry who want to be allies, and you also need the audience members, the people who are consuming the information. So, for you, who are your five A’s, who are your three A’s, right? Like, who are the other people who are situated in a similar place as you, who are doing the work from a different perspective because they are going to bring their solutions to the table.

I find so often that I’m over here like I don’t care if there’s 15 more Latinas on screen if they’re still all drug dealers and maids.

That is not advancing representation, right. And then Munica will be like, okay, so I’m in a green light room making these decisions and we are having conversations about Latinas and that we need more Latinas, but we don’t know how to do it, right, like? And I’m in the room where they’re making the decision to not make that. And this is what this looks like in reality. Nicole, you don’t understand what this looks like in reality, right? And then Joy’s like I’m over here writing this story, right, about this Latina character, and this is what so, like. And then we have, like our friends in like Color of Change, for example, who’s like trying to create these movements of change, like, if we aren’t all talking to each other, our solution is going to fall flat. And so I think that’s really the unique thing about Semi is that we bring these voices together very intentionally. If it is not intersectional, it is not something that’s going to be a progressive solution that’s actually going to create long term change.

0:28:33 - Lee Schneider

And let’s say someone wants something that is a change making organization. What are your suggestions for, or keep sustaining something like that, keeping it diverse? What and what are you doing to sustain Semi and keep it fresh for yourself? So you all want to keep doing it.

0:28:55 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

We have made a big change recently towards this now watching program. We were focused a lot on working with people in the industry, right, it was like if we impact the people in the industry, then we will impact change and, honestly, we were starting to get a little like right, it’s like feels like such an uphill battle and a lot of people are doing that work now. When we started, there weren’t that many people doing that work. And now that work and we’ve seen change in the industry not as much as we want, but of course, you know, here we got changes happening. So we had to reconvene with each other and be like what is the thing we actually care about? And for us it came to we care about stories, we care about the images on screen because we know those impact society. That’s the thing we care about.

So who do we really want to be talking to? The bigger picture there is the audience members, right, and so now we’re having conversation, like we’re doing a big presentation at a pharmaceutical company, right, it’s like here’s people who are doing who they’ve already done their DEI 101. But we know a great way to like learn about DEI stuff is through what you’re watching, right, so bring us in and let’s have this fun conversation. So I think the sustainability piece is check in with the different aspects of what you care about and where they come from and what they’re grounded in, and, as you’re combining those like dig into one right and be like, oh, what could I be doing?

That’s cool in that space and I think that’s why having multiple people from different industries addressing the same issue at the table whether it’s your founder of your business community or if it is your community of people that you’ve brought together that you’re serving, talking to them right and asking those questions like what are the solutions? A lot of times that is the thing that will sustain you is hearing somebody else’s perspective on the thing you care about and figuring out a way together to move forward with a solution with that. So you know, as we know, like progress is not linear, it’s always an up and down thing and it changes and you have to change with the times and and and reassess right, like what you’re doing, and to keep yourself going. So for us that’s been really helpful that it’s not just this one solution but we play in a lot of different lanes and work with a lot of different groups who are all addressing the same thing that we care about.

0:31:21 - Lee Schneider

I think people end up using the term burnout to sort of cover a lot of things, but one thing that really can happen is your mission. It doesn’t get stale because you still care about what you care about, but it’s. How do we keep doing this and what you’re, what I’m hearing from you is that revisit your original passions and look for different ways, different audiences, different ways to get at them.

0:31:50 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

Yeah, I think a lot of time too, that feeling of burnout comes from a backlash, especially those of us who are doing like social justice, work about, like, think about, like the women’s movement right now. Like if you’re doing anything related to the women’s movement, it could feel crushing the stuff that’s happening. But if you actually look at the history of social justice, a backlash does not happen unless change has happened right. There will not be a backlash unless you’re making progress. So it’s this two steps forward, one step back thing. Well, they’ve.

If you study, like the way that the backlash happens, they’re on to you, they know the thing to make you feel burnt out, right, so, to your point, go back and be like cool, now I know I’m making change. That’s like exciting. Now how do I do it in a new and different way? Right, to keep it going. And to us, that’s the thing that brings us hope is knowing that really a backlash is like oh, you’re on to something right, things are happening and that’s why there’s a backlash. And it’s not this moment of crushing despair, right, and that’s the reframe that we do to help us keep going.

0:33:01 - Lee Schneider

Is there anything that I forgot to cover or that we didn’t get into?

0:33:04 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

When it comes to online communities in particular, I think it’s super important to work with young students.

There are so many students who are experts, especially in online communities, because they, like do this like a second language, right, they’ve grown up with this stuff, they understand how to create content in really interesting ways, and they will bring you a diversity of perspective just basis of their age and the popular culture that they’re consuming, right, and so, having these conversations with them and bringing them onto your teams, whether it’s an internship if you can pay them, please pay them for their internships, but a lot of students can get course credit for their internships as well Bring them onto your team, have conversations with them Kids who are, like, passionate about the thing that you’re passionate about and have them help you create content that’s going to resonate with folks and teach you some of the skills, right Of how social media actually works.

We’ve been doing social media for so long and now I feel like I’m like I don’t even know how it works anymore. It’s changed so much, right, and so we’re constantly bringing younger folks to the table, talking to them, to have them help teach us you know how to really create these communities in great ways, so they’re an invaluable asset to us.

0:34:19 - Lee Schneider

Well, Dr Nicole, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. This was great. Thank you, Leigh.

0:34:23 - Dr. Nicole Haggard

This was fun to talk about stuff we care about.

0:34:30 - Announcer

Thanks for joining us on the Future X podcast. Listen on Apple podcasts, spotify, amazon, google or anywhere. Fine podcasts appear in your feed. Post a comment on Apple podcasts and we’ll read it on the show. For more info about Future X, visit futurexstudio.

Transcribed by https://podium.page