Regina Marchi
rmarchi@rutgers.edu
Regina Marchi studies alternative forms of political communication and civic engagement, with a focus on populations historically marginalized from official politics and news media due to their social class, race, immigration status, gender or age. Her recent research is concerned with information-sharing and civic participation in a social media age, examining how youth under 21 (particularly those from minoritized and disenfranchised communities) utilize social media to create, encounter and share stories they feel are important. Marchi and her co-author, Lynn Schofield Clark, have coined the term “artifacts of engagement” to refer to the stories, photos and videos that youth share online, noting that these can serve as precursors to political engagement and connective action. As youth share such artifacts as a way to express their identity and build community, they engage in what the authors call “practices of connective journalism” that can create an emotional engagement in current events that seems to elude traditional journalism. These practices are explored in depth in Marchi and Schofield’s book: Young People and the Future of News: Social Media and the Rise of Connective Journalism (Cambridge University Press 2017).
