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Knight Center crew, alumni attend Society of Environmental Journalists conference

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

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

Can college campuses be biodiversity arks?

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.

New article by Knight Center director on international press coverage of religious freedom

A madrassah in Uzbekistan

The Conversation has published Knight Center director Eric Freedman’s latest article on how the international press covers – and fails to cover – constraints on freedom of religion and faith.

“Religious freedom is routinely curbed in Central Asia but you won’t see it making international news” is drawn from a research project Freedman conducted with professorial assistant Eleanor Pugh of the MSU Honors College. The results of their study were presented at the August 2024 conference of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication.

The Conversation is a nonprofit independent news service that publishes articles by academic experts written for the general public and edited by a team of journalists.

This is Freedman’s sixth article for The Conversation, two of which were translated into French and Indonesian.