Collaborative Investigative Journalism across the U.S.-Mexico border (2021-24, Research Council of Finland)

Investigating Abuses against Asylum-Seekers:

Advancing the Collaborative Model of Investigative Journalism across Regions of the Global South and the North

This postdoctoral research project (2021-24) elaborates on collaborative investigative journalism - a new but under-researched model of multiple media outlets across countries using digital innovations to share information and to expose wrongdoing (e.g. Carson & Farhall 2018).

The empirical research focuses on collaboration between U.S. and Central American investigative journalists, exposing violence in Central America and Mexico and abuses against Central American asylum-seekers fleeing from this violence. Asylum-seekers from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have become objects of increasing hate speech following President Trump's determination to further militarize and extend a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Nogales border wall and concertina wire. Public domain.

The U.S.-Mexico border also marks a geopolitical and symbolic boundary between the Global South and the North. This research extends and advances the collaborative model of investigative journalism by examining whether and how technological tools can enable journalists from both sides of the North-South border to jointly investigate and expose concealed crimes committed by powerful actors against vulnerable and resource-poor populations.

Tapping into field theory's unexplored potential for exploring processes of trans-nationalizing journalism beyond the Global North (Benson 2015), this research builds on frame and field theoretical content analysis integrated with analysis of boundary work (e.g., Carlson 2015).

The empirical sample consisted of investigative coverage co-produced by U.S., Mexican, Guatemalan, Honduran, and Salvadoran journalists between 2016 and 2024.

I examined how and to what extent the norms and forms of capital of the collaborating fields were retained, exchanged, and diffused (Powers 2018; Stonbely and Siemaszko 2022) during the collaborations, and what kinds of new global fields (Buchholz 2022) and investigative norms emerge in the cross-border collaborative process.

Photo by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Department of Homeland Security), Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

My frame analysis was concerned with how North-South collaborative coverage helped to counter xenophobic frames and widen the scope of immigration frames available in the U.S. cultural context (see Benson 2013).

The ultimate goal of this research was to learn whether and how geopolitical and symbolic borders between the Global South and the North are enforced or permeated in the digital collaborative spaces, either strengthening divisions between privileged and underprivileged people and regions or paving the way for in-depth investigative coverage characterized by mutual commitment to truth and global justice. This way, the research will also potentially challenge field theorists' insistence about borders of fields always being a site of struggles (e.g. Bourdieu 1987; 2005; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), pushing field theory to better account for collaboration and social change.

This research was funded by the Research Council of Finland and the University of Vaasa (2021-24). The initial phase of this project (2021) was funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. The Media Industry Research Foundation of Finland supported travels related to this project. The author is also grateful to New York University's Department of Media, Culture, and Communication for hosting me as a visiting scholar from November 2021 through to October 2023.