Dr. John W. Higgins is an associate professor of Communication and Media at Menlo College in Atherton, California, USA. Since 1974 he has been involved in alternative, grassroots, community-based media in a variety of roles. Most recently he served as president of the board of the San Francisco Community Television Corporation, the non-profit organization managing the city’s and county’s public access cable television facilities and channel.

Dr. Higgins’ areas of expertise include community-based, alternative media; media production; media technologies; critical pedagogy; and storytelling and oral history as art and social science. His background includes twenty-five years as a professional puppeteer and street performer. Dr. Higgins’ interest in narratives has typically been focused on the stories told by people within communities. A recent outgrowth of these interests has been digital storytelling, which fuses individual and group narratives of struggle and transformation, personal reflexivity, ethnographic research, and digital distribution.