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Presented by Inkstick Media and Bombshelltoe Policy x Arts, the Creative Capsule Residency provides a space for early and mid-career journalists, academic scholars, and creative workers to nurture and grow their research and/or reporting about pressing global and local security issues. It offers a chance to explore new modes of storytelling, take provocative risks, and imagine a radical workspace that welcomes the interweaving of research, reporting, and creativity.

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Young people today consume and process news through various media formats and cultural commentary, and are less likely to support traditional policy approaches or perceptions of the world order. New ways to meaningfully engage their interest are needed. 

We believe it is important that a new generation of policy thinkers not only look more like those they represent, but come equipped with a broader range of knowledge and skills than generations before.

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You can access recordings to some of the Thumbtack Workshops in our Mass Mentorship Resource Page.

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Isa Arriola

The Little Book of Pentagon Phrases in the Pacific

 

Isa Arriola is a Creative Capsule Resident and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. She chairs Our Common Wealth 670 (OCW 670) on Saipan, a community advocacy group dedicated to research, education and awareness about military planning in the Mariana Islands. She was born and raised on Saipan and is an Indigenous Chamorro woman. Her research interests center around militarism, indigeneity, sovereignty and Oceania.

Read:

The Little Book of Pentagon Words in the Pacific

Creative Capsule Reflections — Making War Feel Good, Island Style

The residency provided me with the necessary space and resources to tackle a particular angle of my research that I had never fully dedicated to creatively crafting. I was especially inspired by the fellow residents and the mentorship throughout the project. The program staff were eager to help with the process and provided opportunities for networking and learning from one another even after the residency ended. I hope that the voices that emerged from the residency can continue to coalesce to craft better narratives about our political lives.

Isa Arriola
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Jennifer Huxta

Cheap Fakes: The Global Trade in Counterfeit Drugs

Jennifer Huxta has worked as a photographer and journalist in East Africa since 2009, often reporting on health issues related to climate change. Some of those stories included malnutrition among pastoralists in Turkana, deforestation and health problems related to the charcoal trade in Uganda, sex workers fighting HIV in Kenya, and reproductive health in the refugee camps in Northern Uganda. This experience led her to retrain as a nurse and she has spent the past 1.5 years working in the Emergency Department in the hospital where she was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The center of her work remains at the intersection of art and science. Her journals explore the crossroads of reportage, drawing, collage, perception, memory, and storytelling. She speaks fluent French and basic Arabic / Swahili / Spanish.

Read :

Cheap Fakes: The Global Trade in Counterfeit Drugs 

Creative Capsule Reflections – Fake Drugs in Kenya and Uganda

“As designed, the residency was a great incubator for me to find new confidence in a way of working that had been integral for me, but that I hadn’t yet found the support for, which is combining creative reportage with drawing and photo, creating hybrid works at the crossroads of multiple interests. I found that support in the Residency.”

Jennifer Huxta
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Anna Romandash

Sea at War

Anna Romandash is an award-winning journalist from Ukraine and an author of Women of Ukraine: Reportages from the War and Beyond. She has extensive experience working across Eastern Europe and Central Asia where she researched democratization processes, freedom movements, and human
rights violations. Her areas of interest include international security, Eastern Europe, sanctions, and energy transition. Romandash is the Fourth Freedom Forum’s first Howard S. Brembeck Fellow, a Research Affiliate at the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College, and a digital scholar at Vassar College.

Read:

Creative Capsule Reflections – The Black Sea

In the eight months of our residency, the stories that I’d encountered—those chronicled and many more that were quietly swept from the paper to my heart—had changed how I write, how I feel, and how I relate to others and this world. 

Hantong Wu
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Susan Aboeid

Exploring the MENA Prison Experience Through Art

Susan Aboeid’s work focuses on humanitarian disarmament and the protection of civilians from indiscriminate weapons such as landmines, cluster munitions, and autonomous weapons. She is an ‘Emerging Weapons Expert’ with the Forum on the Arms Trade and explores the impact and implications of indiscriminate weapons on communities of color and in the Global South. Susan holds a BA in Modern Middle Eastern Studies.  She speaks English and Arabic.

Read :

“Prison Everywhere is the Same”

Creative Capsule Reflections — Where Language Fails

Visit :

An Exploration of Carcerality in the MENA Region Virtual Exhibition at the MENA Prison Forum
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Sumaya Tabbah

Exploring the MENA Prison Experience Through Art

Sumaya Tabbah’s work focuses on carceral systems, the experience of imprisonment, and the use of torture by state and non-state actors. She has previously worked as an Arabic translator on topics including refugees, prison literature, and media in conflict zones. Her interests lie at the intersection of reconciliation and human rights. She holds an MA in International Peace and Conflict Resolution with a focus on reconciliation and justice and a BA in political science. She speaks English, Arabic, and Russian.

Read :

“Prison Everywhere is the Same”

Creative Capsule Reflections — Where Language Fails

Visit :

An Exploration of Carcerality in the MENA Region Virtual Exhibition at the MENA Prison Forum

One of the highlights of the residency was the opportunity to receive mentorship from Liz Sly, a world renowned journalist and former Washington Post correspondent. Sly provided beneficial guidance and advice throughout the residency, helping my colleague and I to narrow our focus in a highly ambitious and wide-scope project involving the intersection of geopolitics and Middle East affairs.

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Hunter Williamson

New Era: Great Power Competition in the Middle East

Hunter Williamson is a freelance journalist based in Beirut, Lebanon. He has covered war and politics in the Middle East and Ukraine. You can follow his work on X @hunterwilliam and Instagram @hunterewilliamson.

Read:

The New Great Game

Creative Capsule Reflections – Lebanon

I am so thankful that I had the opportunity to learn from so many experts from a range of fields and develop my ability to more deeply incorporate the viewpoints and knowledge of others in my artistic practice. Overall, I feel very lucky to have this opportunity. 

Whit Montgomery
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Hantong Wu

New Era: Great Power Competition in the Middle East

Hantong Wu is a freelance journalist. He is looking to offer an independent perspective on foreign policy issues through humanistic storytelling. You can follow his work on Instagram @hantongwu.raw.

Read:

The New Great Game

Creative Capsule Reflections – Lebanon

This residency was transformative for me. It was the first time I really got to use my own voice and opinions to make observations about the world, and that is really scary. But my vulnerability will allow people to connect with the issues I care about and empower them to find their own connection to nuclear weapons and how we impact the land and people when we spend time in remote places. 

Dr. Chantell Murphy
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Dr. Chantell Murphy

Atomsphere

Dr. Chantell Murphy is a nuclear nonproliferation expert with over 12 years of experience creating, developing, and executing innovative ideas that progress the nonproliferation field into a more ethical and inclusive future. As a program manager at a Y-12 National Security Complex, she designs ethical practices for artificial intelligence in safeguards, leads the logistics and readiness for nuclear verification project, and researches sustainable diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility solutions for the nonproliferation community.

Read:

Who We Are — Meet Dr. Chantell Murphy, a Rock-Climbing Nuclear Nonproliferation Expert and Filmmaker, and Creative Capsule Year One Resident

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Whitney Montgomery

Alpine Meadows

Whitney is a Canadian artist who has recently moved to Halifax NS after completing his BFA at Concordia University. He is most interested in creating large-scale satirical propaganda, taking inspiration from old magazines and archived advertisements. He reflects on current social and political happenings through the lens of past decades, highlighting both the novel and archaic absurdities within contemporary ideologies. In many pieces, Whitney embraces an ironic tone to undermine what he sees as toxic beliefs, which he emphasizes by appropriating their logic and pushing it to the extreme. Whitney’s current focus is creating paintings and drawings, sculpture and book arts.

Read :

Who We Are — Meet Whit Montgomery, a World-Building, Satire Loving Portrait Artist, and Creative Capsule Year One Resident

photos of Whit Montgomery's Alpine Meadows art installation, paintings on a white gallery wall with a table in front.
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Terrell Jermaine Starr

Ukrainian Sunflower

Terrell Jermaine Starr is the host and founder of Black Diplomats, a podcast that discusses foreign policy from a social justice perspective. With more than 15 years of journalism experience, Terrell has covered domestic politics at the local, state and national levels, including the 2016 and 2020 elections as a national correspondent for FUSION and The Root, respectively. During the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, his on-the-ground reporting was featured on CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and other television and radio channels. With the Creative Capsule Residency, Terrell’s reporting will focus on how threats of nuclear violence impact Ukrainians psychologically.

This residency made me think more deeply about how we communicate. We want to have clean-cut answers to questions, but they do not exist. 

Terrell Jermaine Starr
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The Creative Capsule Residency 2-year pilot program was funded by the MacArthur Foundation.