Aymar Jèan Escoffery, "Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture" (MIT Press, 2025)

About this episode

Aymar Jèan Escoffery discusses how reparative media can heal cultural harms through community-based storytelling and technology.

Can producing stories and developing platforms to support people who have been harmed by multiple, intersecting systems heal those systems? In Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture (MIT Press, 2025), Aymar Jèan Escoffery argues that this is exactly how we repair our culture and heal harms from racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and religious discrimination: by reconsidering how we make media, how we connect through technology, and how we generate knowledge.Based on five years of deep, complex work cocreating an independent alternative to platforms like Netflix and YouTube, the author reveals the process behind developing OTV | Open Television to stream stories by diverse creators. The book shows that planting seeds for a more community-based media and tech ecosystem can also reform corporate systems better than so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, as the platform helped elevate creators on social media and in Hollywood at companies like HBO, Netflix, and more. Combining theory and practice, local production and global distribution, Chicago and Hollywood, the book paints a portrait of what a healing…

People in this episode

Guest: Aymar Jèan Escoffery

Topics covered

• reparative media
• cultural healing
• technology and media
• diversity in storytelling
• community-based platforms

Keywords

• reparative media
• cultural healing
• technology
• storytelling
• diversity
• community
• media platforms

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: MIT Press, Netflix, YouTube, HBO, OTV | Open Television

Places: Chicago, Hollywood

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