Knight Center crew, alumni attend Society of Environmental Journalists conference

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MSU’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism delegation

Michigan State’s delegation to the 2025 Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Tempe, Arizona, consisted of undergraduate and grad students, faculty members and alumni, including Knight Center founder Jim Detjen and current director Eric Freedman.

The conference – SEJ’s 35th – was hosted by Arizona State University and focused on the theme “Heat, Water and Growth: Confronting the Past, Surviving the Future.” Despite the proliferation of cacti and daytime temperatures in the low 90s, the workshops, panels and presentations were highly relevant to issues in the Great Lakes, including mining, public lands, Indigenous lands, biodiversity, extreme weather, climate change and pollution.

Our student team members were Anna Barnes, Julia Belden, Isabella Figueroa, Clara Lincolnhol, Mia Litzenberg, Shea Paulis and Ruth Thornton.

Great Lakes Echo editor Jeff Brooks-Gillies and Knight Center master’s alumni Kelly House of Bridge Michigan and Kurt Williams of Oregon State University’s Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory rounded out the team.

Detjen was SEJ’s first president.

Environmental communication symposium and workshop hosting Latin American scholars ends in collaboration

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BY ANNA BARNES, SHEALYN PAULIS

Symposium participants

From Mon. March 31, to Wed. April 2, 2025, Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) hosted the Counter-Hegemonic Environmental Discourses in Latin American Contexts Symposium and Workshop. The event featured a full day of panels where visiting Latin American scholars representing eight countries presented their research on environmental communication.

Latin American perspectives are often marginalized from international academic spaces. Systematic barriers prevent researchers from being included in global conversations, such as language, translation difficulties and emphasis on work produced in the Global North. Additionally, the availability of funding is a stark contrast for academics in the Global South compared to their northern counterparts. These barriers have made scientific inclusion and cooperation between the Global North and South challenging.

The event highlighted research and scholarship from Latin America, with discussions centered on the communication of environmental health issues, sustainability, environmental journalism, and hegemonic perspectives. It also explored the audiences and sources of environmental communication, with particular attention to Indigenous and marginalized communities. Continue reading →

University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum Presentations

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Five Knight Center undergraduate assistants have presented their year-long research at MSU’s annual University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum at the Breslin Center.

 

Shealyn Paulis and Anna Barnes

Shealyn Paulis and Anna Barnes, who worked with Knight Center research director Bruno Takahashi, presented their project “Environmental Communication in Latin American Context.”

Patrick Ferrino and Katherine Dyal

 

Katherine Dyal and Patrick Ferrino, who worked with Knight Center director Eric Freedman, presented their project “The Lived Experience of Journalists in Exile.”

 

Clara Lincolnhol

Clara Lincolnhol, who worked with Great Lakes Echo editor Jeff Brooks-Gilles, presented her project “Experience as a Great Lakes Echo Environmental Reporter.”

 

Can college campuses be biodiversity arks?

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Knight Center director Eric Freedman’s new feature article examining how universities can protect biodiversity appears in the spring issue of the environmental magazine Earth Island Journal with photos by journalism master’s student Donté Smith.

In reporting the story, Freedman and Smith traveled to Albion College in southern Michigan for a campus bio-tour with prairie ecologist Sheila Lyons-Sobaski.

Freedman also interviewed Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, plant biologist William Sanders of Florida Gulf Coast University, environmental science doctoral student Mikaela Sako of Baylor University in Texas and Daniel Orenstein, an associate professor of urban and regional planning at the Israel Institute of Technology, or Technion.

The article also drew on research by scientists in Indonesia, Portugal and China.