Anushka Joshi: Creating the Space to Rewrite the Future
Anushka Joshi had always loved reading, writing, and storytelling. She didn’t approach this passion from a journalistic side, Joshi had more of an interest in storytelling through the mediums of film and fashion.
“My connection to storytelling actually drives from the fact that when I was in high school I really felt connected to media and representation and how those visuals impacted the way that we see, perceive, and go about the world,” said Joshi. “I wanted to reinvent a piece of culture to make it regard social change.”
At 14, that meant becoming the creative director and editor in chief at Vogue, which at the time lacked diversity and representation. Growing up in Palo Alto, California, that dream became hard to prioritize given the curriculum in her schooling. Fast-forward four years to Joshi’s freshman orientation at USC, she attended a meet and greet with her department heads. She wanted to find classes that encompassed her passions for her future, “I was so nervous at the time I wasn’t able to fully articulate what I wanted to do.” Lucky enough, one professor pointed her in the direction of the class ‘designing media for social change,’ Joshi would soon learn this class would encompass everything she wanted to do.
She learned about actual media practices and how messages spread throughout society through different mediums. A capstone project to create a magazine was assigned with the theme of gendered violence. With two of her peers, Sam and Eden, Volume 1. Issue 1. Of the GEN-ZiNE was born. “We created this beautiful magazine that addressed how gendered violence manifests in our everyday lives,” said Joshi.
One year later, Joshi and her co-founders followed with Volume 1. Issue 2. a print issue on multiculturalism. They then started the Instagram page as an online community for people outside of their team to get involved.
As GEN-ZiNE grew, so did Joshi’s experience as an editor. Outside of GEN-ZiNE, she had no experience in editing, “I don’t know how I’m here sometimes.”
Joshi had mixed feelings about her role as editor. She loved coming up with ideas for GEN-ZiNE, curating them to tell a larger story and getting to hear from experts themselves. On the other end, having to edit people’s work and telling them what she doesn’t like is not her favorite part of the job.
Joshi draws inspiration from Elaine Welteroth, the former editor-in-chief at Teen Vogue, who played a large part in making the magazine the “woke machine it is today.” One of her strongest memories was meeting Welteroth as a college freshman, “I told her ‘I want to be you when I grow up’ and she said ‘Trust the process’ and four years later she’s right.”
