Karen Stevenson

What is the cHURCH? | WITNESS Media Lab | Livestream

March 12, 2017
11:00am

Join us at the cHURCH OF MONIKA as Karen Stevenson discusses the her work with the WITNESS Media Lab and their new project, “Capturing Hate.” This is a free event. Bagels and coffee will be served.

The hard won legal victories that the LGBTQ community has achieved in the U.S. has triggered a backlash. There have been over 100 proposed anti-LGBTQ state laws since the passage of marriage equality in June 2015, many of them specifically targeting transgender people. Anti-LGBTQ violence, particularly against transgender people of color, has been called an “epidemic” by anti-violence groups, and, a majority of U.S. states can legally exclude transgender communities from public accommodation, employment, housing and healthcare.

Meeting the needs and understanding the issues facing transgender and gender nonconforming people is understudied because general population surveys that currently determine policy, social services and funding do not include questions about gender identity beyond the male and female binary.

And, being uncounted means being overlooked.

The WITNESS Media Lab incubates emerging technologies and practices dedicated to unleashing the potential of eyewitness video as a powerful tool to report, monitor, and advocate for human rights. The Media Lab’s newest project, “Capturing Hate,” studied viewer engagement with eyewitness videos that show acts of transphobic violence that were filmed, shared, and engaged with as entertainment. The videos and viewer engagement with them tell a powerful and disturbing story of the abusive and often life threatening environments that transgender and gender nonconforming people navigate daily. This project explores the untapped potential of eyewitness video as a way to fill that gap. By collecting and analyzing viewer engagement with eyewitness videos, they have found an innovative way of unmasking patterns of discrimination and abuse.

Karen Stevenson leads the WITNESS Media Lab, a program dedicated to developing solutions to ensure that eyewitness video can serve as an effective tool for justice. She has a Master’s degree in Journalism from Indiana University and has been a consultant, experience designer, and technology project manager for Fortune 10 media companies, arts organizations and non-profit advocacy groups.

Karen launched Brooklyn’s first 24×7 community cable channel, creating the borough’s only live, daily news show, several Emmy-nominated programs, and a community Town Hall series. She served as Senior Director of Digital Media at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts where she oversaw the installation of the award-winning campus digital signage system and designed the content systems that manage it. She co-founded a non-profit media institute that has trained journalists and media entrepreneurs in the U.S., Poland, Albania, Turkey, and the Pacific Islands. She’s been a digital media consultant to the American Chambers of Commerce to the European Union and was selected to be the Digital Media keynote speaker at their Annual Plenary Meetings in Warsaw and Istanbul.