To purchase or read the full book, head over to MIT Press.

REPARATIVE MEDIA

Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture

We are more connected than ever before.

So why has it felt like our cultural divisions, our deepest collective wounds, are intensifying? 

If culture is an ecosystem, corporations control too much land for harvesting our attention, connections, knowledge, and data. They serve us culture and information as fast food: monoculturally farmed then quickly packaged, produced, and distributed for us to binge for entertainment.

Can we cultivate a better system? When we view culture as an ecosystem, we see that diversity, interdependence, and sustainability are key to our collective thriving. Healing our collective wounds—racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, classism, ableism, and other forms of hate—requires a specific method of repair: re-distributing power more equitably to the historically disempowered.

Reparative Media imagines this community-driven process as a cookout: spaces where we all own and share organically crafted and ancestry-informed nourishment. This book offers a story and framework for storytellers, scholars, organizers, and funders trying to start or sustain such projects.

This book explores reparative media through the story of researching and developing OTV | Open Television. You can think of OTV like Netflix but independent, locally rooted, and powered by intersectionality. OTV’s app hosts films and series by Chicago-based artists who identify with multiple communities historically marginalized by systems, or intersectionality.

You can read the full Reparative Media book at MIT Press. You can read the Offerings for Consent presented to artists in advance of publication here.

On this page, you’ll learn more about the individual films and series discussed in the book.

For a preview of these series, check out this super trailer: