Social Media Storytellers began with a simple question: what does academic freedom actually mean for students? Over two quarters, twelve UCI humanities fellows explored that question through interviews, research, and original media projects, working alongside faculty from across the School of Humanities.
Curious to see what the Academic Freedom Fellows created? Check out their projects!
Kayla Luke Colon
Melody Garcia
Kayla and Melody’s four-part social media series uses Instagram reels to engage UCI students directly, making the meaning and importance of academic freedom accessible to a wider campus audience.
Rachel Gama
Naomi Yoshikawa
Naomi and Rachel’s 23-minute video essay charts the parallel decline of academic freedom across two eras of American conservatism, from 1950s McCarthyism to modern MAGA politics, and the ongoing legal and civic fight to protect it.
Tucker Heneghan
After tech conglomerates absorb the public education system, students are raised on sleek techno-campuses staffed entirely by AI educators. A resistance group called the Front de Libération Académique, however, seeks little ways to reclaim autonomy. Listen to more from Tucker's work of fiction on academic freedom in the dystopian future.
Allison Melendez
Geneses Navarro
Geneses and Allison’s podcast series interviews at-risk scholars about their personal experiences with threats to academic freedom, both domestically and internationally, while also exploring the work of Scholars at Risk, an organisation that relocates endangered academics to safer institutions worldwide.
Iris Forster
Benjamin Mendoza
This website is both an educational resource and a living record of the Academic Freedom Fellowship, documenting the guest speakers, frameworks, and student projects that shaped the cohort’s understanding of academic freedom at a critical moment in its history.
Leisa Komyo
Through interviews with faculty and student leaders, Leisa’s project explores how identity, institutional role, and power shape who gets to speak freely in higher education, and whose voices are protected, silenced, or pushed toward self-censorship.