Welcome to Footnotes and Fallouts
An Introduction Post
Hi readers! Welcome to the first post of Footnotes and Fallouts! My name is Leisa Komyo, and I’m so happy you found my page :)
I’m a fourth-year at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), double majoring in Film & Media Studies and Literary Journalism, with minors in Humanities and Law and Political Science. By the time you read this post, I have already graduated, but before I walk across that stage, I wanted to do something that felt true to everything I’ve spent four years chasing: the story behind the story.
That’s what brought me to Footnotes and Fallouts.
A little bit about me
I came to UCI eager to understand how stories get told and more importantly, who gets to tell them. Literary Journalism taught me to sit with complexity, to resist the easy headline, and to trust that the most important information often lives outside of the actual writing. Film and Media Studies taught me that every frame is a choice, and every choice carries meaning. Add in a minor in Humanities and Law, an internship in Washington D.C., time covering breaking news, and years of work in front of and behind the camera, and you get someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about voice, access, and what it means to speak freely in different rooms.
I’m also multilingual, fluent in English and Japanese and an intermediate speaker in Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, which has shaped how I think about communication across different cultures and contexts. A word that translates cleanly in one language often carries entirely different weight in another. The same is true of ideas. And that, it turns out, is exactly what this project is about.
How I got here
This year, I was selected as one of twelve students in UCI’s School of Humanities for a fellowship called “Social Media Storytellers: On Academic Freedom”. This program was fully funded by a VOICE grant from the UC National Center for Free Speech and co-created by Dean Tyrus Miller and Communications Director Kelly Anne Brown.
The fellowship isn’t a typical course. We met weekly with faculty from across the humanities, attended seminars on how academic freedom differs across national and institutional contexts, and participated in hands-on workshops on podcasting, video production, narrative writing, and social media. We also got to sit down with UCI Chancellor Howard Gillman himself and discuss his new book on campus speech.
What struck me most, though, wasn’t any single lecture or reading. It was the recurring realization that the words "academic freedom" mean something different depending on where you’re sitting in a university whether you’re a tenured professor, an instructor, a student in their first quarter, or a department chair navigating institutional pressure. Each of them occupies a different position, carries different risks, and experiences the supposed freedom of inquiry in a fundamentally different way.
The tension in academic freedom as a principle and academic freedom as it’s actually lived is where Footnotes and Fallouts begins.
What is Footnotes and Fallouts?
Footnotes and Fallouts is an interview-based, multimedia project that explores how academic freedom is experienced differently across a university campus, not as a uniform or universally shared principle, but as something personal, variable, and often contested.
Through in-depth conversations with faculty members and student leaders at UCI, the project investigates how identity, institutional role, and affiliation shape what it means to speak freely, take intellectual risks, and navigate disagreement within higher education. What does a junior professor unprotected by tenure risk when they challenge an idea in their field? How does a student advocate balance having political conversations in the classroom and their academics?
Footnotes are where the qualifications live. In academic writing, the footnote is often where the most honest thinking happens. It’s also where you can see who a scholar is in conversation with, who they’re afraid to cite, and what they're trying to say without quite saying it.
Fallouts are what happen when those ideas escape the footnotes. When a course gets scrutinized. When a faculty member speaks publicly and faces institutional consequences. When a student asks the wrong question in the wrong room or publishes something that has unexpected consequences. Academic freedom, in theory, is meant to protect against fallout. But the protection isn’t distributed equally and that unevenness is what I want to map.
The debates currently reshaping campuses across the nation about what can be taught, who can say what, and what counts as protected inquiry are not abstract. They affect real people learning and working in real institutions.
Each chapter will be rooted in a specific conversation, with a specific person, about their specific experience. I’ll be writing, producing audio and video, and doing what literary journalism has trained me to do: getting close to the story in real-time.