The decline in print media circulation and the rise in news-as-entertainment has made it increasingly difficult for journalists to support themselves while preparing stories that can take months, and sometimes years, to produce.
At the same time, the systems that serve children and families are poorly equipped to meet the needs of the children and families of the future. New insights are required to foster systems-level responsibility for the future and drive the innovations required to meet the demands of the years ahead. It is necessary to cultivate diverse voices capable of producing new work, ideas, and reporting on and for children and their families, to help us imagine alternative futures of flourishing and well-being.
Capita and AIR Serenbe, an artist residency in Georgia, are launching a series of fellowships for journalists engaged in complex and long-form reporting around the pressing issues facing families with young children, and the way these issues affect children’s health and development. By giving journalists uninterrupted time in an environment that promotes creativity and focus, and financial support, the partnership seeks to help tell stories that have the power to change lives and ensure a future in which all children flourish. Today, we are pleased to announce the inaugural Capita + AIR Serenbe Journalism Fellows who will complete residencies at AIR Serenbe this fall.
Cinelle Barnes is a memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir (Little A, 2018) and Malaya: Essays on Freedom (Little A, 2019), and the editor of A Measure of Belonging: 21 Writers of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, 2020). She earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College. Her writing has appeared in Buzzfeed Reader, Longreads, Catapult, Electric Lit, Los Angeles Review of Books, ReliefWeb, Literary Hub, and Hyphen, among others.
During her time at AIR Serenbe she will begin work on her next book which is narrative-driven investigation and series of essays shedding light on how colonialism, neocolonialism, industrialization, globalization, climate change and “poorism” have caused an unprecedented global water crisis, and on how we can return power – in the form of clean drinking water – to those from whom it’s been stolen.
Keren Landman is a practicing physician, epidemiologist, and journalist who covers topics in medicine and public health. She is trained in internal medicine and pediatrics with specialties in infectious diseases and clinical microbiology, and served as a disease detective at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As a researcher, she has focused on the prevention and treatment of HIV and malaria in resource-poor countries, and she has worked as a medical epidemiologist at the New York City health department. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Undark, Elemental, The Atlantic, and Wired.
Keren will use her time at AIR Serenbe to report on the educational and developmental fallout of the digital divide through the lens of one low-income family living in central Georgia.