Originally broadcast at 10:30 a.m. ET Tuesday, July 13, 2021.

As Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia, Meredith D. Clark’s research focuses on the intersection of race, media, and power, exploring the relationships between Black communities and the news on social media. Clark’s academic analysis of Black Twitter landed her on the Root 100 list of most influential African Americans; now evolved into a theoretical framework of Black digital resistance, her book is under contract with Oxford University Press. In a week dedicated to “Trust, Society and Democracy,” Clark will focus on reparative journalism as a way to rebuild trust in the Fourth Estate.

Clark is the author of “DRAG THEM: A Brief Etymology of Cancel Culture,” published in Communication & the Public in 2020. Her research has also been published in Electronic News, Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, Journal of Social Media in Society, New Media & Society, and Social Movement Studies. She is Academic Lead for Documenting the Now II, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and develops new scholarship on teaching students about digital archiving and community-based archives from a media studies perspective. She is also currently a faculty fellow with Data & Society, a faculty affiliate at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, and sits on the advisory boards for Project Information Literacy, and for the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies at New York University.

Clark earned her bachelor's degree in political science and her master's degree in newspaper journalism from Florida A&M University, and her Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

About Chautauqua Institution: Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue. CHQ Assembly is the online expression of Chautauqua Institution's mission.