Regenerative Media
Community-Led Practices in Storytelling, Design, and Research
About the project
Regenerative Media introduces regenerative media as a design movement and research framework for storytelling, design, and research with communities. It argues that community-led practices, cultural memory, and living knowledge are essential for building more just futures. The book makes a clear claim: community knowledge must guide how stories, research, and media are made public. It moves beyond familiar calls for reciprocity, mutuality, and co-creation by showing what community-led work requires in form, process, and responsibility.
The book combines a clear framework with grounded examples. A set of framing chapters defines regenerative media, explains why it matters, and offers a practical model for community-led storytelling, design, and research. These chapters are interwoven with contributed chapters that show the framework in practice through language revitalization, poetry, land and water stewardship, Indigenous foodways, acequia advocacy, public humanities, and collaborative media-making.
The result is a book for scholars, designers, artists, educators, and community-based practitioners who want both a strong conceptual argument and a usable framework for working with communities in more accountable, relational, and regenerative ways.
Make it stand ou
At its core, regenerative media and design emphasize a framework of collaboration, sustainability, and equity. This initiative seeks to dismantle traditional power imbalances in design research by promoting a regenerative framework where community members play a pivotal role in guiding the process. The project adheres to community-led principles such as holistic impact, transparency and accountability. Through these grassroots design research practices, the Regenerative Media Project empowers communities to generate meaningful, long-term change.
An example: The Beautiful Social Research Collaborativeis a prime example of a regenerative media project that has made a significant impact. This community-engaged writing program within the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Saint Joseph’s University involves community stakeholders in every aspect of the design research process. Doing so ensures that community needs and perspectives are prioritized, shifting traditional power dynamics and promoting equity. Over the past fourteen years, the collaborative has partnered undergraduate communications students with community organizations, providing services such as new media consultancy, social media management, web design, and video free of charge.
The Beautiful Social Research Collaborative embodies regenerative media principles by engaging in inclusive participation, where community members co-create media content, and by fostering sustainability and resilience through long-term partnerships. This approach equips community partners with the tools and strategies needed to effect lasting, transformative change, demonstrating how regenerative media can build capacity within communities and address systemic issues of power, privilege, and positionality. Read more