Associate Professor Joel Beeson is receiving international recognition for his diversity research.
This month the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) announced that Beeson is the 2016 recipient of the Lionel C. Barrow Jr. Award.
Created in 2009, the award recognizes outstanding individual accomplishment and leadership in diversity efforts within the journalism and mass communication discipline. AEJMC (then AEJ) established the award to honor Dr. Lee Barrow who fought to diversify the association and the media industry following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King.
Beeson will receive the Barrow Award at AEJMC’s national conference in August.
Professor Beeson is currently leading a collaborative initiative with Morgan State University’s School of Global Communication and Journalism, a historically black urban institution, to develop a Social Justice Media Project. This collaboration resulted in Bridging Selma and the virtual reality app, Fractured Tour: An Immersive VR Tour of Selma’s Divides.
In addition to the Barrow Award, Beeson’s work on “Fractured Tour,” won two awards at the 2016 Broadcast Education Association’s (BEA) Festival of Media Arts. It won the Chairman’s Award, which is decided by the former chairs of the Festival and is awarded annually to the best overall student and faculty entry. “Fractured Tour” was singled out of more than 1,500 submissions to win the award, which competed in the Faculty Interactive Multimedia category.
It also won the BEA Best of Festival King Foundation Award—only 18 winners received this prestigious honor.
Morgan State student Emily Pelland was the assistant producer for the piece.