Beautiful Social Research Collaborative

For sixteen years, the Beautiful Social Research Collaborative has brought students and community partners together to create more than 160 public-facing media projects informed by community knowledge and their visions for change. Founded by Aimée Knight in 2010, Beautiful Social is a community-engaged writing program grounded in COM 441 Media and Community Engagement and COM 442 Nonprofit Communication in Saint Joseph’s University’s Department of Communication, Film, and Journalism. The collaborative approaches rhetoric as the ways people use language, stories, images, sound, design, and digital channels to form public understanding, build relationships, and participate in civic action. Its guiding question is: How might writing, design, and media-making become forms of community-building?

Beautiful Social begins with a community-identified goal. Students and partners frame a design question around it through a creative, equity-based process. Projects generally take three forms: production, training, and research. Students might build a website or podcast, lead a digital storytelling workshop, research current media practices, or conduct a rhetorical media analysis. In each case, they put theory into practice with a partner. Students learn to write for and engage communities online; partners gain technical and rhetorical skills for producing and circulating their own media.

Projects include websites, podcasts, videos, newsletters, social media campaigns, branding, and digital stories for organizations in Philadelphia and communities around the world. Three recent collaborations represent this work. Students helped the Free Mind Entrepreneur Network integrate a podcast and redesign its website so formerly incarcerated people could tell stories of reinvention and entrepreneurship in their own voices. With Water Is Life Kenya, a team co-developed digital marketing and e-commerce strategies to support the sale of beadwork made by Maasai women, making the objects more tangible through the screen while highlighting their community significance. For Right 2 Redemption, students used visual and digital rhetoric to redesign the organization’s homepage so visitors encountered the humanity of people affected by life-without-parole sentences on the front page.

Across its wider history, Beautiful Social has worked with nonprofit organizations, Indigenous communities, people who are currently or formerly incarcerated, and other partners in the United States and abroad. The work is grounded in co-creation, reciprocity, shared authority, and respect for community knowledge. It supports partners in developing technical and rhetorical strategies for producing and circulating their own media. Students learn how discourse can support advocacy, question dominant narratives, strengthen community knowledge, and build capacity for community-led change.

Beautiful Social provides sustained infrastructure for engaged teaching and public scholarship through courses, paid fellowships, internships, summer workshops, a public project archive, and Knight’s open-access book (2022), Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change. The collaborative shows what becomes possible when rhetoric is practiced as a way of building community and creating conditions for social change.