UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Shaheen Pasha, assistant teaching professor of journalism in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, has received the 2022 Outreach and Online Education Emerging Faculty Award for Engaged Scholarship.
The Emerging Faculty Outreach Award is a University-wide honor that recognizes early-career tenure-track and nontenure-track faculty members whose work has significant potential to advance engaged scholarship through teaching, research and/or service. Their engaged scholarship work shows significant potential to influence societal issues on local, regional or national levels.
Pasha is being honored for her commitment to Prison Journalism Project, an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan national initiative launched at Penn State designed to train incarcerated writers to be journalists and publishes their stories, so they can shift the narrative and help shape criminal justice policy.The goal of the project is to give incarcerated people an outlet for creative expression, strengthening their communications skills and allowing them to shed light on news, stories and lived experiences about incarceration and the issues related to it to the general public. Pasha is co-founder and co-executive director of the project that was recognized by the Nieman Lab in its “Predictions for Journalism 2021.”
“Today most stories about prison are written with an outside perspective. And while there are prison creative writing programs, many housed in universities, that allow for creative self-expression, the Prison Journalism Project takes it one step further,” Pasha said. “Our work, based in journalistic pedagogy and decades of professional experience, gives incarcerated and incarceration-impacted writers the ability to take the power of journalism into their own hands, learn the craft of journalistic storytelling and share their stories of life behind bars both on our dedicated publishing platform and in mainstream news media.”
Pasha said meaningful criminal justice reform can take place only after we gain this invaluable inside perspective on the realities of the more than 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S.
Nominators said the project gives “voices to the voiceless” and is a “powerful example of journalism that privileges not the storytellers, but truthful, fact-driven storytelling.” They also praised the project’s impact on education for Penn State students.
“Pasha has engaged students in this work, opening their eyes to a feature of American society – our massive system of incarceration – that had been invisible to them,” a nominator said. “As these students graduate, they will be taking this awareness and understanding out into their communities, their professions and their lives as citizens.”
Nominators credited Pasha and her project partner, former Wall Street Journal reporter Yukari Kane, with building a strong network of experts including retired New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller; author Nikole Hannah-Jones; and Charles Whitaker, dean and professor at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. It’s also gaining support from foundations and other allies, who recognize the greater impact the project is capable of.
“Its potential to influence the lives of individual prisoners is obvious but so is its potential to impact societal issues at the local, state and national levels, as it involves interaction with and awareness of a vast, underserved and largely invisible population in the U.S. and a system that continues to exact a high cost for American society,” a nominator said. “This program is as innovative as it is important, and Professor Pasha has the passion, the skill and the long-term vision to grow its impact.”
A participant said the project helped him find his voice. He called it a powerful medium that could help change the narrative about incarcerated people.
“Pasha and the Prison Journalism Project help shine light on the overcrowded jails and prisons in America and how impossible it is for prison officials to provide the basic level of care necessary for human wellness,” a nominator said. “The conditions many incarcerated people are being exposed to exacerbate the very conditions penal institutions claim it’s their goal to fix. It is vital that the world be able to hear from those who are being kept in cages. We need people like Pasha and projects like this so we can tell our stories and help facilitate systemic change.”