Out of Eden Walk on Campus
Photo by Chris Johns
In partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, I’m pleased to offer a half-day Walk on Campus Workshop based on the multimedia reporting of Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Salopek on his Out of Eden Walk project, a 7-year, 22,000-mile walk across the world in the pathways of early human migration, from the earliest Homo sapiens site in East Africa to Tierra del Fuego, Chile.
The Walk on Campus Workshop is an interactive, three-hour presentation of the Journalism curriculum based on the Walk that I developed at the Robertson School of Media & Culture at Virginia Commonwealth University and now teach at the University of Richmond. For more on that curriculum and to see a video on the Walk for educators, go here.
Practicing an extreme form of “slow” journalism, Paul is creating a unique, 150,000-word (and counting) multimedia resource that is being published, in part, by National Geographic with a grant from Knight Foundation. His cover story introducing the Walk appeared in the December 2013 issue of the magazine.
In addition to narrative dispatches and the project’s state-of-the-art mapping and translations, Paul is pausing every 100 miles to create a systematic record of his surroundings through photography, video, audio, and old-fashioned interviewing. By the time Salopek reaches Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of South America in 2020 or ’21, he will have created an unprecedented record of human life across a transect of the 21st century world.
That reportage provides a unique learning resource for university professors of journalism, geography, anthropology, history, international studies, environmental science, English, education, and other disciplines—all of whom are invited to participate in the Walk on Campus Workshop.
If you’re an educator interested in hosting the Pulitzer Center/Out of Eden Walk on Campus Workshop at your university, please contact me, or Ann Peters of the Pulitzer Center.
Out of Eden Walk partners include the National Geographic Society, the Knight Foundation, the Abundance Foundation, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Project Zero at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, the Nieman Foundation, MIT MediaLab, and Harvard’s Center for Geographical Analysis.