Learning to Hold Stories: How the Media Fellows Are Reimagining Research in Community

Over the past several months, the Media Fellowship at the Wealth and Work Futures Lab has been engaged in two forms of work at once: conducting research in community and rethinking research itself.

In the 2024–2025 cohort, the Media Fellows connected with 30 young people across the city in conversations lasting 40 to 75 minutes each. We strived to not have these be interviews in the traditional extractive sense, but genuine exchanges rooted in curiosity, mutual respect, and a commitment to making people feel heard. 

Before ever sitting down with a participant, the fellows reflected on their own experiences of what it feels like to be truly listened to, and what it feels like to be dismissed. They brought that awareness into every conversation. We then brought these insights to the young people we connected with in an interactive data walk. You can read more about that work in our Zine, “Guarded Yet Hopeful: Young Philadelphians on Place, Loss, and Possibility.”

Building off that work from last year, the Media Fellows are learning how young people in Philadelphia experience grief, loss, well-being, and work through surveys, in-depth interviews, and participatory co-design sessions. We are calling this project “The Hidden Burden: Unacknowledged and Disenfranchised Grief Among Black Youth in Philadelphia.” Alongside IRB approval, CITI Training, co-designing surveys, and interview questions, we have been doing something harder to name: examining the assumptions underneath research itself, and asking what it would mean to move away from extractive practices toward something more relational, more accountable, and more just.

That question — how do we prepare ourselves to hold these stories in order to transform our world? — has guided our weekly Wednesday sessions since October 2025.

Confronting the Colonial Roots of Research

We began by sitting with some uncomfortable history. Sabrina Meherally's essay "The Colonial Machinery of Research" from pause + effect helped us understand that modern research as an institution was not born from innocent curiosity. It grew, as Meherally argues, from systems of conquest, empire, and control. Tools originally designed to categorize, surveil, and subjugate. Even methods we might consider benign, like ethnography, have colonial roots: early practitioners were often soldiers, missionaries, and administrators studying communities they sought to dominate.

This called us to ask, ‘how do we do this work with care and intention?’ This is a commitment to relational rigor. A notion that intention and care about quality relationships, not just the quality of data, guides the work and runs through everything the fellows have been building. As one fellow put it, “the readings feel less like academic preparation and more like a set of values to carry into every conversation. A reminder that the goal is to benefit humans, not subjects.” Another drew a direct line between these colonial logics and the extractive patterns we risk reproducing without awareness: researchers take stories and move on while communities are thanked in the acknowledgments and often left out of the benefits. The invitation in Meherally's work — and in our own sessions — has been to ask harder questions: Who does our research serve? Who gets to define what counts as evidence or truth? In what ways does our practice mirror the systems we claim to shift?

Seeds, Grief, and the Wisdom of What We've Lost

The fellows also engaged with seed keeper and activist Rowen White, who joined Prentis Hemphill's podcast to speak about ancestral grief, collective memory, and what she calls "the diaspora of disconnection." Her conversation reframed grief not as something to resolve, but as something to move through with reverence. Our call is to explore the threshold between what has been lost and what might still be remembered.

One Fellow connected White's idea of the "cultural container" to the very gap the Hidden Burden project seeks to understand: without a shared cultural framework for grief, young people are left to carry heavy losses in isolation, often without language or ritual to process them. Another described White's perspective as rehydrating something: "we can reclaim our power and create a different energy for care" by practicing the kind of fascination that opens us to what grief has to teach us, rather than running from it.

For a research project that will ask young Philadelphians to share some of the most tender parts of their lives, this matters enormously. The fellows are not just learning, practicing and reflecting interview techniques, they are learning how to prepare to carry the stories they'll be trusted to hear and metabolize.

Narrative, Power, and Who Gets to Be Seen as Deserving

Anne Price, co-founder of The Maven Collaborative, joined the fellows for a session on the relationship between narrative and economic policy. Her argument is clear and urgent: no matter how bold or well-designed a policy is, it will fail if the cultural narratives underneath it go unaddressed. The three narrative buckets she identifies — toxic individualism, the conflation of personhood with paid work, and anti-Blackness — function as invisible gates on public imagination, determining who we see as deserving of support and who we don't.

The fellows brought sharp responses. One noted how deeply the "personal responsibility" narrative is embedded even in people who suffer from it. Reflecting on how it shapes how people talk about food stamps, child support, and assistance of all kinds. What struck everyone was Anne's insistence that narrative work is not softer or secondary to policy work. It is foundational to it. Stories build power. The question is always: for whom, and toward what end?

Weaving and Otherwise

Earlier in the year, the fellows watched a webinar featuring the authors of a book by the same name. The authors are a group of transnational researchers, artists, and Indigenous knowledge keepers working at the intersection of decolonial practice and narrative change. What landed most wasn't the theoretical framework. It was how the group showed up with each other. Land acknowledgments didn't feel performative. Because members were joining from different places, each simply named the Indigenous peoples of the land they were on — fluently, without apology. For the fellows, this acknowledgment as daily practice rather than ritual performance was striking.

One fellow was particularly moved by the idea of "reconsidering notions of gifting" — that compensating research participants isn't just a transaction, but can be a form of cultural relationship. What if what we offer participants reflects genuine care for their well-being, not just their time? That reframe — from transaction to gift, from exchange to relationship — connects directly to how the fellows are approaching their work with Hidden Burden participants. The distinction, as one fellow put it, is between getting into relationship with people and actually building relationship with them. It has led us to explore ways to provide resources and care post-interview with young people and ensure we have informal gatherings to center relationship over process. Learning from Neighbors: The Promise Research Zone Collaborative

Sometimes the most powerful lessons come from people who have been doing the work longest — and doing it close to home. In February 2026, the fellows attended a panel featuring members of the Promise Zone Research Collective (PZRC), a West Philadelphia organization born out of the neighborhood's designation as a Promise Zone under the Obama administration. As research dollars flooded the area, community members decided they needed a seat at the table — not just as subjects of inquiry, but as stewards of it. Today, after years of organizing, the PZRC pays community members to participate in the research process and functions as a protective layer between researchers and the communities they study.

What struck the fellows most was their honesty. Panelists spoke openly about IRB limitations, the persistence of power imbalances, and the reality that even trusted community members can be met with resistance. They also spoke about what shifts when a community stops being the object of research and starts being the authority on it. The PRZC's journey is a useful reminder that relational research is not a method you apply. It's a culture you build.

Moving Toward Something Different

As the project has moved into its active research phase – interviews, survey outreach –  the fellows have been reflecting on what all of this means in practice. They've been designing consent processes with care. Writing field notes that go beyond data capture to hold the humanity of what they witnessed and heard. Thinking together about what it means to engage participants not as sources, but as collaborators and knowledge-holders.

This is slow, relational, ongoing work. It does not produce neat conclusions. But it is producing something perhaps more valuable: a group of emerging researchers who understand that the questions they bring to a conversation shape the answers they receive, and that the dignity of the people they speak with is not incidental to their methodology. It is the methodology.

What's Coming

The Hidden Burden Project has a goal of collecting 150 survey responses, 75 qualitative interviews, and hosting 2–3 co-design and participatory data sessions over the next year or so. 

If you want to learn more or have questions, feel free to email at info@wealthworkfutures.org.