The LinkedThru Project is a digital literacy bootcamp that teaches formerly incarcerated people the technological skills, social media etiquette, and narrative building skills to create a LinkedIn profile. The goal is to enable and empower them to proactively share an online narrative that combats the stigma of online criminal records, arrest articles, and mugshots that so often limit their life opportunities.
I reframe the utility of a LinkedIn profile as not just a professional networking tool, but a multimedia storytelling space to provide a more authentic view of oneself in the present. When a name is searched on Google, the profile appears within the first few results because of the LinkedIn platform’s high domain authority, ensuring their own narrative is at the center of their digital presence.
“One new program aiming at addressing this is called The LinkedThru Project...The program is unique in its focus on giving people agency over their digital and public identities after spending years in a system designed to control people’s access to the outside world.”
Behind the scenes video of the last in-person workshop, where Vaughn, O’May and William published their profiles.
The LinkedThru Project was developed as my Master's thesis for the Media Design program at Emerson College, advised by Professor Eric Gordon of the Engagement Lab. After five months of design research, co-creation workshops, and speculative design with formerly incarcerated fathers, I ran the first prototype of The LinkedThru Project with William Cabrera Jr, Omay Ford, and Vaughn Lewis in summer 2022.
My deep gratitude to advisors Professor Rashin Fahandej, Senior Co-Creation Fellow at MIT and Jeff Smith of the Massachusetts probation office, for without their meaningful Nurturing Fathers partnership and XR co-creation class, this project would not have been possible.
Special thanks also to spring 2022 participants of the Emerson XR Documentary class!
MEDIA ART GALLERY EXHIBITION
@ EMERSON COLLEGE
For my thesis exhibition at Emerson’s Media Art Gallery, I reframed the LinkedIn profiles again—this time, as art, contextualized in a museum space.
Who gets to be the artist of their own life, the creator of their destinies, in the 21st century digital information age?
I also screened a short behind-the-scenes doc of our in person workshop at the Cambridge Public Library, displayed the design thinking process, and invited visitors to engage with the LinkedIn profiles live.