Elisabeth (Lissa) Soep

Youth Radio

Area of Expertise:

Youth media; digital culture and literacy

Elisabeth (Lissa) Soep is Research Director and Senior Producer at Youth Radio, a national youth-driven production company in Oakland, CA. With a PhD from Stanford, she researches and writes about youth discourse, learning, and digital media culture for academic journals, popular websites, and books including Drop that Knowledge (Soep & Chávez, UC Press) and Youthscapes (Maira & Soep, UPenn Press). The Youth Radio stories Lissa has produced for NPR have been recognized with honors including two Peabody Awards, three Murrow Awards, an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. With NSF support, Lissa co-created the Brains and Beakers series—interactive dialogues between youth and inventors. She is Principal Investigator for a 2010 winning entry in the MacArthur Foundation’s global Digital Media and Learning Competition, which launched Mobile Action Lab (youth partnering with pro developers to create mobile apps serving community needs). She teaches grad classes on ethnography and education, including a 2011 Urban Education course at UC Berkeley. Lissa joined the MacArthur Foundation’s research network on Youth Political Participation in 2011.