Audience Driven Content
From succinct marketing copy to engaging thought leadership to insightful museum interpretation, my narrative approach to writing and content development is designed to communicate novel, complex, or even boring (but important!) information to targeted audiences in concrete and approachable ways. Below are examples demonstrating the breadth of work I’ve done and have to draw on when approaching new projects and environments.
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Thought Leadership
You have the experience, you have the expertise. Drawing on focus groups, interviews, and original research, I position your company or institution as the industry leader it already is.
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Ghost Writing
Not everyone’s a writer and not everyone needs to be. I help industry leaders communicate their expertise in engaging and venue appropriate ways.
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Digital Marketing
Email + Social + Website. I get the word out there.
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AI Optimization
Navigating Google’s algorithms in the age of AI is a new game. Original content cuts through the noise and reaches audiences looking for something real.
Some Other Things I’ve Done
A miscellany of client, projects, and initiatives showcasing the different genres I’ve worked across.
The Outbound Collective
Adventure guides for the outdoor enthusiast.
Marketing the Wilderness
Marketing the Wilderness presents a groundbreaking examination of the complex relationship between the outdoor recreation industry, public lands, and Indigenous people. Whitson takes a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on environmental history, political ecology, Indigenous studies, and American studies to unravel the often-overlooked role of the outdoor industry in shaping American relationships to the outdoors. Forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press, Spring 2025.
Patterns of Removal: The Mass Incarceration of American Indians
Indigenous Geotags
Indigenous Geotags is an environmental justice project and resource dedicated to decolonizing and indigenizing America's public lands. Designed to raise awareness of the indigenous history of public land in the United States, we share the stories of dispossession and the ways contemporary American Indian nations are fighting to practice their cultural and economic activities in these spaces, many of which are treaty-guaranteed rights.
This collaborative project brought together archival sources, community interviews, and statistical data to establish a case for Carceral Colonialism; by exploring the incarceration and surveillance of Native bodies, and the resistance to these measures, we aimed to illuminate the carceral patterns of Indigenous communities across time and space.
Singing our History: People and Places of the Red Lake Nation
A collaboration between the Red Lake Ojibwe and the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, this exhibition explored the many ways the Red Lake Nation has been and continues to be portrayed by artists and members of its communities through art and photography.
Image: Jerome Liebling
Singers at Pow Wow, Ojibwe Reservation, Red Lake, Minnesota, 1953.
© Jerome Liebling Photography
The Landing: Minnesota River Heritage Park Digital Interpretation
A digitally-augmented tour of the Three Rivers Park District’s heritage park in Shakopee, MN
Saloum Delta National Park: Eco-Tourism Research and Recommendations
Two months of fieldwork working to develop eco-tourism strategies in collaboration with park rangers and management at Saloum Delta National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site in Senegal.