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Open Call: Liberatory Media Residency

Are you building media practices that imagine different worlds?

CU Boulder's Center for Media, Religion & Culture (CMRC) invites activists, artists, entrepreneurs, and scholar-practitioners to apply for our Liberatory Media Residency — a year-long cohort experience designed to support public-facing, community-rooted interventions for liberatory social change.

About the Residency

Residents will join a vibrant, multidisciplinary community at CU Boulder as part of the CMRC's Religion in Emergent Media Spaces project, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. This initiative cultivates new forms of media research and creative practice at the intersection of religion/liberatory theologies and theories, critical media intervention, community formation, and alternative media pedagogy. Residents will join a vibrant, multidisciplinary community at CU Boulder to develop their media practice while participating in ongoing conversations about religion, media, and liberatory futures.

What Are We Looking For?

Through this residency, we are particularly interested in projects that:

  • Produce public-facing interventions with legible community impact
  • Experiment with media as a space of collective learning and critical reflection
  • Engage religious, spiritual, or ethical traditions as generative resources for media imagination
  • Develop community-based, participatory media practices
  • Explore alternative pedagogies of media making and distribution
  • Contribute to broader public conversations about media, religion, and social transformation

Rather than emphasizing finished media products, this residency foregrounds process, experimentation, and collaborative inquiry into what liberatory media practices might look like and what they might make possible.

What Will Residents Do?

Residents will collaborate with the CMRC community to imagine, design, and implement spaces and practices of collective engagement. These spaces may be physical, digital, or hybrid, but should move beyond conventional models of community-building toward forms that offer genuine liberation, care, and justice. Residents are invited to bring their own projects, questions, and communities into conversation with the CMRC's ongoing work and to leave having meaningfully developed their practice, thinking, and networks.

What Do We Mean by Liberatory Media Practice?

This residency builds on our 2025 counter-media cohort, which brought together a generative community of media makers and significantly expanded the CMRC's collective thinking about alternative media formations. This year, we are sharpening our focus around the concept of liberation — asking not only what media resists, but what it makes possible. Liberatory media practices are forms of communication, storytelling, and pedagogy oriented toward community flourishing and collective self-determination. They challenge the dominance of extractive, institutional, and platform-driven media logics. 

Residency Overview

As a member of the CMRC residency cohort, you will:

  • Receive a stipend of $25,000 to support your creative and research work
  • Develop a media project or practice connected to liberatory media and religion
  • Participate in the CMRC's weekly seminar (two hours per week during business hours, Mountain Time)
  • Collaborate with scholars, researchers, and fellow media practitioners
  • Contribute to RHYTHMS, the CMRC's pamphlet series exploring experimental and public-facing forms of writing and reflection
  • Complete your residency remotely or in person at CU Boulder, September 2026 – May 2027

While remote participation is welcome, priority will be given to applicants located in the Boulder/Denver region who are able to engage regularly with the CMRC community in person.

Application Requirements

To apply, please complete the application form and submit the following materials:

  • Resume or CV
  • Link to online presence or portfolio
  • Project proposal (800–1,000 words) describing the media practice, intervention, or pedagogical experiment you would like to develop during the residency

Application deadline: June 1, 2026. Decisions will be communicated by July 15, 2026.

About the CMRC

The Center for Media, Religion & Culture is a dynamic gathering space for scholars, students, and media practitioners engaged with the social and cultural dimensions of media and religion. At our center is a weekly seminar that functions as an open space for collective study, experimentation, and insurgent learning. Through collaborative research, media practice, and public engagement, the CMRC explores how media shapes religious imagination, social life, and cultural transformation. Our journal and pamphlet series, RHYTHMS, provides a platform for unconventional forms of writing, reflection, and media experimentation. We are committed to a culture of theoretical curiosity, collaborative rigor, and care in both scholarship and community.