What happens when you remove speculation and police narratives from a crime story? What facts are you left with, and how do you know they’re really true?
Maya Dukmasova, a senior reporter with Injustice Watch, will lead you through an interactive workshop to deconstruct biased narratives in crime reporting for yourself in the first edition of Illinois Humanities’ new RE:ACTION Workshops series.
Maya’s workshop will center on her recent work of investigative journalism featured in Envisioning Justice RE:ACTION, titled truth, facts, reality | stories, claims, lies, and the interactive prompt she designed for the Activation Kit to allow readers to take a critical eye to crime news in their own communities.
“The goal of my Activation Kit prompt is to encourage people to engage more critically with local news coverage about crime, wherever they may be living,” Maya says. “There is a great deal of conjecture in crime reporting and amplification of narratives told by law enforcement officials in the heat of the moment.”
Maya will take audiences inside her work of narrative nonfiction commissioned for the RE:ACTION Exhibition and originally published in the Chicago Reader. Her project traces the story of James Allen, a man who has claimed to be innocent of the murders he was convicted of, and unravels the assumptions, biases, and doubts that shape wrongful conviction journalism.
View Maya’s prompt and see how others have responded in the Activation Kit >>
Register below to attend this workshop live with Maya on Zoom on Thursday, June 16 from 6:00 p.m. – 7:15 p.m. CDT.