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Like many people growing up in the 1990s, Andrew Young remembers the violence of the Rwandan genocide playing out on nightly newscasts, with anchors warning viewers of the violent imagery they were about to encounter.

It was only when he went back to study media coverage of the atrocity as a graduate student that he found memory and history were out of alignment.

“Things did not happen exactly as I remembered them. The U.S. media didn’t even have reporters based in Rwanda when the genocide started,” said Young (Film, Hist’08), an assistant professor of media production at the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information.

What he found, in studying network nightly news segments from the time, was “shocking discourse and ill-informed analysis going on by journalists—though they were doing the best they could with what they had.”

That sense of misremembering has fueled Young’s creative and scholarly interests. That includes a documentary, Kigali100, completed as a student, and two publications this year—including a book, , that came out in the spring. It also might characterize , a game he created in 2021 to explore the idea of recall and identity against misremembering a historical event.

The book and article, which was published in the , draws on the work he started while creating the documentary. Young analyzed news broadcasts to examine kinds of coverage, the attitudes of media toward the atrocity and the ideological content of those broadcasts. The terminology used by anchors and reporters, he said, reveals a racialized and exoticized posture of those broadcasters that he said should challenge us to think critically about news reporting in general.

Something Young became curious about during the course of his work were the “reconciliation villages” that made neighbors of Tutsi victims and Hutu perpetrators after the atrocity—something that caught his attention while visiting Rwanda to make the film.

Critical thinking around reconciliation

“Everything I do starts with a question—something I don’t understand, something I’m trying to grasp, and usually it revolves around my own limitations as a human being,” Young said. “I wanted to understand how people in that context could forgive one another—like, if you orphaned your neighbor’s children, then adopted those children in order to atone for that—I struggle to rationalize that.

“There’s a lot of scholarship, particularly out of journalism, that’s asking what reconciliation actually means in Rwanda, when people have had to erase their core ethnic identities in this sort of post-ethnic state,” Young said. “Who doesn’t love forgiveness, right — but what are the actual implications of that? Because there is this sort of underbelly to it.”

Andrew Young

The hybrid approach of creative practices and critical studies-meets-journalism is something special about CMDI, which combines different, but related, perspectives in ways that prepare students to become critical thinkers who search for ideas and answers in the places where disciplines intersect.

In fact, Meghan Sobel Cohen (Jour’09), who joined the journalism faculty this fall as an associate professor, is familiar with Young’s work from her own research interests into media systems in authoritarian contexts. She said Young’s work helps people understand how Rwanda’s carefully cultivated image was built—“through decades of deliberate media discourse that fused forgiveness, unity and loyalty to the state into a single, difficult-to-question ideology.”

“Understanding Rwanda’s media architecture is essential for anyone trying to make sense of how ‘reconciliation’ gets defined, marketed and enforced,” Cohen said, “especially amid ongoing global conflicts; A.I. use; and the rapid, borderless spread of state-driven narratives across digital platforms.”

Young’s contribution in the face of the geopolitical landscape is a major point of pride for him. The country’s free speech protections are weak, limiting Rwandan scholars from speaking and publishing as candidly as he was able to.

“The deeper I went into my research, the more I realized the incredible risk that Rwandan scholars take in writing about their country. I don’t know if my contributions will ever open up a space for Rwandan scholars to be able to do this kind of work, but I hope they do.”��

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.