Alethea Franklin

Alethea Franklin

Alethea Franklin is the student recipient of the Heartland Journalism Fellowship and a rising senior majoring in psychology and brain sciences, with a minor in writing, all in Arts & Sciences. She is also an executive board playwright with Black Anthology and a Gephardt Institute Fox-Clark Civic Scholar. Her writing explores the impacts of urban planning, design and infrastructure on housing and health outcomes in ethnic communities.

Posts by Alethea Franklin

Film, Music, Visual Arts

How the Candyman Films Examine the White Savior Complex and Exploitation Through Art and Collective Trauma

      The Candyman films (1992 and 2021) set out to tell a harrowing narrative of historical and modern-day racial violence in Chicago. Oddly, this began when director Bernard Rose bought the rights to Clive Barker’s novella The Forbidden. The Forbidden dealt with themes of class and social abandonment in the UK. Still, Rose, […]

Personal Essays

Politics, Protests, and Prose

While societal norms often discourage us from discussing politics, I found that this could not be further from the truth in D.C. Instead of causing a notorious Thanksgiving style blowout, it united people with a common passion. Not because we agreed on everything, but because we had chosen to entrench ourselves in politics to the […]