I came home with such desire to collect and finish out the final thoughts I have about global youth media, mostly growing out of relationships and encounters in youth video making.I especially was hoping to write about youth organizing and activism and power-police-security, in relation to the time I’ve spent today and yesterday sitting and watching the protesters, sitting in the occupied building, trying to be really attentive to the unregistered movement and communication and poetics and ritualistic dance happening between the students occupying, those using the space to study, the security, and the other subjects an objects of power.

I also have a ton of stuff to do to get ready to go home. Physically, I mean. I need to clean, pack, organize.

Final Thoughts… not complete yet

This class has been really reflective for me. I think I’ve thought long and hard about youth media, about education, about peace and justice and hope. And of course about the body and emobodiment and space. It’s been so deeply connected to stuff I have been reading about connectivity and space and networks, so I’ve been trying to think about it that way. I think I’ll write this last blog in the style of Shaviro, who wrote “Connected” this entire book in fragments, like tiny moments and peices of information that are very related at the core of their being but whose existence is only flickering… Pulled from the backlogged blogs are in italics. Written in real time now is not in italics. I have highlighted moments, encounters, words that seem to hold potential in the sense of Tsing’s globalism, and in Hayles’ embodiment, hooks’ simple writing Giroux’s and Freire’s words.  Trying to make sense of a semester in a blog written in the fragmented-spiritual-hopeful-painful-flickering way we exist….

(11/20) its still important to think about how we represent. Its still important to wonder whether a film is made through exploitation or relationships of learning and respect. Race, gender, sexuality, eating the other, hooks, Mohanty and a hundred others weigh in on this. Youth need to be part of the debate. But how is it different when you make a film about someone you don’t know or understand, perhaps one that objectifies and then put it on YouTube, allowing it to enter into a stream of particpation and viewing that could catapult its being into nothingness or into ciruculation through the traces of force?

(11/21, SL blog)“The body is both the persistant site of self recognition and the thing tht will always betray you. It dreams of its own redemotion and knows better” (Kathleen Stewart, 1036)

(11/20 unpublished draft) He said I didn’t take it seriously, like I needed to focus more.  As though I could have gotten anything out of it when she lie there so still and bleeping. Like a ghost without a soul. Just a body. Gone, but they keep her little body breathing, like she can become a breathing machine. And the kids don’t even know what to do. Just swear and act tough. I might as well too. Who the fuck cares about anything when such a simple thing like keeping a alive bright girl engaged can’t even happen? Why would we make a documentary about something we don’t care about when such turmoil tuggs at our souls, when a grandmother starts to talk about donating organs? I’m for it in life, but seeing her like that, I don’t know how I could even imagine someone cutting her open even more, tearing her body into peices. I want her to be whole, to be full of life. Maybe she’ll come back. Its only been a day.

(11/21, SL blog) “The proliferating cultures of the body spin madly around the palpable promise that fears and pleasures and forays into the world can be literally made vital all-consuming passions” (Kathleen Stewart, 1039)

(12/5, SL Blog) These new niches of existence and of being release potential for our learning about each other in new embodied forms. This is very important because in what bell hooks refers to as a “racist capitalist hetero-sexist patriarchy,” the lines of division between different kinds of people with different kinds of bodies are highly threatening and destructive in the pursuit of knowledge.
Power is so loaded. Bringing me back to struggle. To cold hard tile floor green beneath my back and my arms pinned by hands bigger than my own. Power is the woman named Elsa riding on a motorcycle through the mountains of the DR, organizing left and right, educating, instilling hope and bringing paint. Encouraging, hugging. Thats power. Power is about organs and blood pulses and a terrifying fear so deep it freezes your stomach and your throat. Power is Elsa and Laura cooking Its about no one hearing tears, and everyone coming together in a room to agree, to coalesce, to hope and to yearn. Its brilliant paint on the wooden frame of the casa club. And brilliant blood from my body on the green tile floor. Its so loaded with hope and tragedy. Its so filled with emotion. And so guarded so no one knows deep inside this word lies life and pain and eagerness and sheer joy and utter disbeleif. How can one word confuse me so, leading us in myriad of circles that do not connect? Or do they?

(11/12) So video might overshoot. It might aim to save the world, spark enlightenment, shift visions and empower the communities and people of the world to be more than is realistic. Sometimes we imagine romantic workings, idealized romantiscized moments in video. We imagine our youth saving the world. I am definitley guilty here. I often think video can catapult us into a new youth led world order, though I am even more often shocked by the reality of working with youth in video- shot because of my expectations they will catapult us into that new world order. Its a fascinting tug of war. With these kind of dreams, one is forced to try to align resources- individuals, institutions, etc. And then comes the moment where the stars align, everyone is on the same page, and visions happen. And almost, almost, the youth reach that moment where they can save the world. And so we keep beleiving.

Because there is force. We can believe because there are forces. I’m not convinced this is new with new media. Of course we are all kind of interpollated, stuck into each other, regulating our beings and each others’ beings. Its not like we’ve ever existed in a vaccum. New media makes the virtual more visible. We’re shocked we’re connected. Our livelihoods our traces. Our youth are monitored. I can direct a camera into your window by accessing a certain website with cameras on almsot every corner of every street. I can know where you are, and your actions ripple out to me.

(11/20) When you make a beautiful piece of art, or write about love and care and hope, or make a stunning documentary like “The House is Black,” who sees, why do they see, and where- or what- is the purpose? Is the purpose of research that is experimental to move academia in new ways? Is moving academia to reconsider knowledge a valid purpose for academic research? Does moving academia in new ways result in moving society and the world in new ways?

Freire wants the waves to be as big as the ripples. For there to be such hope in the clear blue waters that pebbles of thought, mini little seeds of ideas are so clear and hopeful and imaginative that you can see them. They don’t get lost in murkiness, and every drop into the pool is valuable, making ripples until we can no longer feel them, but somewhere else they are felt. Hasn’t it always been so? Or are we instead corrupting the ripples, turning them into waves theat stirr and murky the water, making us unable to find each other? Pinning us down on hard green tile. Hoping but its cold. So cold. And the pain is peircing.

I want to hope for it. I want to continue to have this space. I want to be in this moment of reverie, where I get to simply listen to the goodness that comes of people thinking and listening and imagining. What happens when we can actually engage? Its hopeful.

It coexists. It has to. Hopefullness mingles with hurt and sadness, like it can only grow and strengthen a resolve to beleive. A last resort, you have to beleive in something. I refuse to beleive this is all there is. I refuse to beleive blood can be drawn so simply. That fear can so paralyze me. Me! That this could happen to the girls I love so dearly, that this has happened to those girls. A human right, I guess. But I’m skeptical because its so dehumanizing. To a point where there’s no language to talk about it.

(10/28) “When women separate (withdraw, break out, regroup, transcend, shove aside, step outside, migrate, say no) we are simaltaneously controlling access and definition. We are doubly insubordinate, since neither of these is permitted. And access and defintion are fundamental ingredients in the alchemy of power, so we are doubly  and radically insubordinate” (Kearny, 128)

Let it go. It has nothing to do with academics. Stop spiraling everything back to it.

(10/18) Then we did circles of my multicultural self with a twist- only choosing things- and they could be senses, body parts, identities, ideas, passions- that we were really proud of to put into our circles, represented by four rocks. Then they shared them, and told a partner why they were proud of that circle-rock, what it meant to them.They chose things for their circles unlike other youth I have done this activity with. Often, youth choose race, gender, sex, family, place, space, hobbies. These girls did also, but they did so in a way that sort of involved sensing of the world, which I think had to do with the way the activity was introduced.

I’m so often doing a thousand things…

Freire:

Freire wants people to activate. He wants youth to access power. He wants to locate change within building networks through education. Freire wants to give individuals and communities the knowledge and support in order to organize, educate each other, build networks of power… its an unstoppable way to activate change and power, because the ripples are as big as the waves.

Noddings:

Noddings wants people to learn to care. She wants ideas and diverse episotomologies to be valued. She is dreaming that we can let go or priveleging different kinds of subjects. She wants learners to be able to pursue their interests and she wants all those interests to be valued. She wants their to be genuine care and hope and love between teacher and learner, learner and learner, learner and community…

Freire and Noddings:

In many ways, Noddings spells out one way of making Freire work in schools. She gives us many ways for kids to explore. But less is her emphasis on transformation and activism and change like Freire- its there, and I think she would support it, but she’s not structuring her work around it. Freire, on the other hand, I think would LOVE Noddings circles, and would build on them in order to emphasize the need to access power and cultivate beleif and empowerment. Freire is a little more about bringing to the center of the discussion the marginzalized, and sparking power and hope that leads to sustainable knowledge about how to work with, access, change, collaborate on or about many subjects. He’s like the spark to discovery. Noddings is a little more about just loving and caring.

And what comes to mind?

La Loma.

Thats not a story I feel like writing right now, but its deeply relevant to this all of this. It has Freire action, organizing, grant writing, accessing power, locating power in the center of the circle of young people doing an ice breaker. It has Noddings caring, in the sheer love and friendship it was built upon. I think it gets at all of Freire’s themes, and I think its beauty takes us back to Noddings.

The whole thing was like Millie’s video. That was hot.

Teacher-Dad Tension

Digital Ethnography Paper: Learning to Care in S

Virtual Tools: Learning to Care about Difference in SecondLife Chelsey Hauge Ethnography and New Media  Professor Jason Pine Dec. 8, 2008

Virtual learning spaces and tools have potential to shift the pedagogical spaces in which transformative learning evolves. These new spaces force individuals to conceptualize and relate differently in a manner that at once incorporates both embodied experience and disembodied presence at the same time that virtual and real worlds converge.   As this happens, the way we sense the world morphs, mediated not only through the body and language but also through the machine used to access the virtual environment. The loops of understanding does not privaledge body, language, of the intelligent machine as it  This loop of understanding does not differentiate between body, language, and the intelligent machine (the computer), and forces reconsideration of the learning process. The extension of the loop of knowing and the convergence of virtual and real worlds in meaning making opens a pedagogical space in transformative education for learning about difference in a manner that is caring, compassionate, and empathetic.  This paper looks at the experiences of three young adults in the virtual world SecondLife as well as transformative educational theory and new media theory in order to conceive of how transformative education around issues of difference including race, gender, sexuality, and class can effectively use the tools of virtual environments in order to enrich the learning process.The young adults live together in New York City, hailing from South Carolina, California, and Mexico. There is a male in his late twenties who I will call S; and a woman in her early thirties who I will call K, and myself- I am a woman in my mid twenties. After introducing both participants to SecondLife, I toured them through a few of the sims I am familiar with, including dance parties, a French bar, a clothing store, and a music café. The participants went through guided experiences, such as changing the appearance of their avatars (digital representations of the self) and trying to make friends with someone new, or find a creative outlet. After the participation in SecondLife, we also engaged in discussion about the experience and its meaning. Participants wrote diaries after each experience, and then reflected together in a shared physical space about the experience. Diary entries and images from this experience can be found on my blog, http://chelseyhauge.wordpress.com. This is an example of how a research project in SecondLife might be done in the future, on a larger scale in order to consider how learning about and across difference can occur in SecondLife.
Education desperately needs to resolve the contradictions and inequalities that result in tension and inaccessible experiences for those adversely affected by power relations. We live in a world where youth urgently need to learn to overcome conflict of difference so that they can peacefully partner for radical sociocultural change. This might be done by structuring transformative educational experiences about difference to emphasize care, concern, love, celebration of difference and compassion. Nell Noddings, in her book “Learning to Care in Schools” suggests that if education was structured around circles of care, problems of difference and alienation would subside. This would occur because all students would engage in learning about how to care for themselves, intimate others, physical objects, distant others, nature, and ideas, among other topics. This would topple the hierarchy currently plaguing our education system that places a higher value on traditional liberal arts subjects like math and history. This value system privileges certain kinds of learning and interaction with knowledge, which is alienating to learners who have talents that are devalued. In addition to being alienating this system serves as a model to teach children and young people to reject difference and erect divisive barriers among which some people are defined as more capable and more intelligent. With Noddings’ idea, we move education beyond these barriers, transcending difference and celebrating unique talents. transition The most significant finding from this small pilot study is that SecondLife experiences are most powerful learning tools when used as a component of a larger educational plan. Individually, the three participants were able to play in SecondLife with characteristics of the body like height, size, color, and gender. We were also able to try out different ways of presenting ourselves without experiencing the consequences of embodied being that present real barriers in real life. The ability to experience difference like this relates the notion that embodiment of experience is not left behind in SecondLife, and nor does it replicate real life at a distance.  SecondLife and RealLife interact in ways that do not leave the body behind, but instead extend “embodied awareness in highly specific, local, and material ways that would be impossible without electronic prosthesis” (Hayles, 290). Media and literary scholar Katherine Hayles theorizes that it is impossible to conceive of consciousness- whether virtual or not- without embodied knowing and experience. She goes on to explain our interaction with virtual realities and smart machines like computers and mobile media technologies to be examples in which our loop of knowing extends beyond the body and language- knowing is also filtered and structured through the machine.
The participants struggled with the integration of their bodies and language with the computer and virtual reality. They found themselves at odds with the physical appearance of their avatars and the many ways they could re-create their avatars bodies, genders, and dress. This produced a tension between embodied experience and disembodied representation. The tension that was experienced  was not expressed during SecondLife but rather in post-SecondLife shared spaces. Intense discussion about identity, judgments, power, and relationships ensued. Hayles’ perception about processing the world through the body, language and computer manifested itself in our experiences in SecondLife. The manifestation created both tension and thoughtful reactions to the experience. This is the kind of fertile ground SecondLife can help to prepare for transformative education about difference.
When we use SecondLife as a tool in transformative learning, we are able to expose youth to important decisions and conversations about the politics of representation. Marika Lunders, in her article “Conceptualizing Personal Media,” argues one must be able to act as a cultural producer and engage with many others in order to participate in virtual communities. Through the productions of cultural artifacts participants are able to engage or understand the virtual world around them (Luders).  Additionally, multi-modal literacy is necessary in order to make sense of visual, sensory, and auditory information about avatars which represent bodies of other participants. Examples of ways in which SecondLife users engage through cultural production include the creation and maintenance of an avatar (the digital people who inhabit SecondLife and who are controlled by program users), dressing for parties, creating and hanging out in art in galleries, and interacting both through auditory speakers and visual written communication. SecondLife avatars often give gifts, have jobs, and attend parties. All of these activates require participation in culturally acceptable norms and require the user to produce cultural artifacts. The artifacts reflect both the physical life outside of SecondLife experienced by the user as well as the negotiation of multi-modal literacies, which generate particular meaning within SecondLife. This engagement with physical worlds, cultural artifacts, and multimodal literacy’s within SecondLife suggests that engagement with virtual worlds allows for learning to occur in and around the politics of representation and difference. This is an excellent space for youth to “play” with and experiment with the politics of representation. Of course, it requires caring and empathetic post-play/experimentation facilitation that fosters critical inquiry. This kind of environment and play might serve as a point of entry that is engaging for young people to then think critically about Otherness and difference.
The potentiality of role play in SecondLife provides an opportunity to experience reality newly, in a manner impossible without electronic prosthesis. Our experiences in SecondLife represent our own interaction and engagement with knowledge as produced by the body and our deep preoccupation and curiosity with what happens when we represent ourselves to others and that body– while still connected as part of the processing loop- becomes invisible to others. The invisibility of embodied knowledge releases a kind of play that might be less inhibited and release new sensations of being. Certainly, it allows young people to try on different skins, genders, clothing, and ways of presenting themselves. Fostering discussion post SecondLife on this fluidity of identity and representation can lead to education about the fluidity of difference, hopefully fostering care and curiosity about difference amongst the learners. Because of the lack of physical body appearance behind the avatar, an intense curiosity seems to manifest itself. The participants in this study all asked considerable questions about who the SecondLife users are in real life, mostly focused on what they look like but also ranging to include jobs, interests, and other topics. While experiences in SecondLife do indeed suggest an interaction of the computer with the body in order to build relationships with others and the world as Katherine Hayles has so clearly emphasized in her book, this machine-mediated experience needs to be paired with real interaction in order for it to become a transformative learning space for the participants. This was evidenced in journal comments about appearance and role play that emphasized physical characteristics and their relationship (or lack there of) to what, or who was behind the screen. The participants made many comments about their avatars not looking like themselves, trying to be someone else, and even about users “cheating” their identities through changing what they look like in SecondLife.
The high level of engagement with the physical does lead to a certain degree of curiosity that is powerful insofar as it moves participants to ask many questions of each other about the others life that are not guarded or shaped by assumptions made about physical appearance. However, these questions tend to stay in the physical realm, and the participants tend to ask each other questions and/or comment on how differently avatars and their “people” look, act or behave. Focusing on this difference between real and digital puts an emphasis on what we dream or aspire to be like physically, and could guide research about desires and dream states about the body and image. This does not, however,  facilitate transformative education unless it is coupled with other tools of empowerment. But when Second Life is coupled with real interaction and discussion about the above mentioned characteristics it can have the potential to fuel transformative education and critical consciousness. In the right setting, it serves as a play-space to explore questions about identity and relationships as they are linked to questions of power like race, sexuality, gender, geography, age, and other markers of power. However, without post-SecondLife experiences that are situated in a Frierian construct of education for critical consciousness, the experiences in the play-space bear no meaning in real life.
Initially, I considered that the question-asking and curiosity about how one is so different physically in real life than in SecondLife interpretations might hold potential for users and learners to effectively care about each other in new ways in the sense suggested by Noddings. However, it became apparent in this very small experiment that caring is more likely produced through the critical engagement in real space rather than in the SecondLife space alone. In order to foster this kind of empathy towards others at all, users first need to move beyond stereotypes and stigmas attached to users of virtual worlds.
SecondLife provides a very interesting platform for people to come together in one virtual space even as they are at great distances physically. For those of us interested in building critical consciousness and in activating young people to take a lead in international issues, SecondLife appears to hold endless potential. This virtual space does indeed hold potential for connecting youth globally. We must be careful, however, to construct learning in a way such that young people are able to engage both in SecondLife and in real life in supportive environments. These environments should be structured around Noddings circles of care. In designing a curriculum for youth educators that opens pedagogical spaces of critical consciousness and makes use of virtual worlds, we should consider creating “home groups” of learners who interact with other “home groups.” Home groups, in this vision, would be small groups of students working with a facilitator or educator to guide them in local contexts. These groups would engage in significant team building activities in order to build trust and community within the group. Home groups could then engage on SecondLife with other home groups from other states, cities, nations, and continents. This would require educators coming together globally to construct a series of themes about which the youth could engage. Likewise, youth playing a leadership role could select and help to guide home groups through the themes.
While youth would participate in virtual activities surrounding a variety of themes, they would process these experiences in their home groups. The home group leader would be responsible for creating a pedagogical space where issues of power, activism, and justice could be interrogated. Creating informed youth in this manner, and providing a supportive environment that networks with other supportive home groups is crucial. In this context we see the vision shared by many media theorists of a networked existence consisting of nodal points come into focus in terms of education and young people. Issues would be shared and learning exchanged through the network, each home group serving as a point of gathering for tiny nodes of interaction, and those tiny nodes would each make up a larger node in the network (Hayles, Shaviro).
The reality of ubiquitous computing in the lives of youth worldwide has potential to affect education tremendously. However, this shift needs to be carefully planned out in ways that are beyond our current educational system. While wide-scale change like that suggested by Noddings is possible in the digital world and in pockets of transformative learning that take place largely after-school and in the summer, the formal education system is largely unprepared such radical change. For this reason, progressive use of virtual worlds in education that focuses on empathy, care, concern, love, and hope in the world seems to exist and flourish in after school pockets and in small and very progressive private and charter schools. The existence of educators working in this mode is hopeful, however the movement is piecemeal, existing in islolated pockets and inside of small networks of communities scattered across the globe. It is a movement that finds its space outside of the canonical education system which Paolo Freire also chose to work outside of in order to be most effective. At this moment in time, it would be most effective for educators and theorists as well as youth learners to come together to begin to bridge the gaps in learning and access that still plague our youth. Digital worlds hold extreme potential for learning in new ways, for releasing questions and curiosity about difference, and for providing experiences to youth that they can then process in the real world in pursuit of critical consciousness and peaceful youth alliance building and leadership. Digital tools need not operate in isolation as educational systems or milieus, rather, they should be incorporated into transformative learning and used to excite a curiosity and wonder in young people. Digital environments have extreme potential to strengthen the transformative education movement and to spark a sense of curiosity, hope, and innovation in the lives of both young people and educators.

Works Cited

Clark, Andy. “A Sense of Presence”. Pragmatics and Cognition (2007): 413-433.   Hayles, Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  hooks, bell.1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, New York: Routeledge.  Luders, Marika. “Conceptualizing Personal Media” New Media and Society  (2008).   Noddings, Nel. 1992. The Challenge To Care in Schools. New York: Teacher’s College Press.   Shaviro, Steven. 2003. Connected, Or What it Means to Live in the Networked Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  Smith, Randall B. “Experiences with the Alternate Reality Kit: An Example of he Tension Between Literalism and Magic.” (1987): ACM-0-89791.

All work archived with participant diary entries and images at:  Hauge, Chelsey. http://chelseyhauge.wordpress.com/.

Packaging Media

This class was about using films, media, photographs, etc as pedagogical tools to open up spaces for conversation and learning with youth.We talked a lot about hooking the learners- beginning the lesson with something fun and interesting- pop culture-esque. This I think is fairly clear for most people, finding some way to enter the subject matter through the lives and interests of the youth. Whats not clear, I don’t think, is that this is do-able in media. Elementary school teachers always do this in math, science, whatever the subject matter. How many apples did you cut to learn fractions? How many times did you play a game to start talking about rhythm? Yet for some reason we lose this creative way of learning when we leave elementary school.

Packaging kind of brings it back. Media learning re-introduces inductive learning in this way. I was very interested and inspired by speaker Pablo Toledo, who spoke about packaging media and his own experiences at Venice Arts and other youth media orgs. Something I found especially interesting was the partnership between Venice Arts and USC. There’s something innovative and similar to what I wish to do in academia about the partnership of this amazing org with an academic institution, even though it is USC.

I was so inspired by the discussion. I kind of got lost in my own thought about the subject and tuned out my fellow students rsponding verbally because I was so caught up in ideas…

In hooks to education. In excitement. In the sheer joy of learning when its fun and emotional and makes you smile. It made me want to get a sketch book and sketch out all of the hooks I can think of. This is why I loved being the training director for East Bay AMIGOS- because Sita and I would spend hours eating fruit, drinking coffee and tea, and coming up with hooks to hook in a a new generation of amigos, to hook them in and make them emotional about something so deeply personal to us. What comes to mind is the AI workshop (appreciative inquiry) we started in the DR in 2002- wow, 2002- and still facilitate. We’ve worked it over and over again, drawn pictures and re-written methodologies. I could recite it in my head backwards and inside out while I am sleeping. We lived with it, dreamed about its potential. Knew how promising it could be. And just kept shifting that hook, trying new hooks, drawing in the wondrous people we shared it with. How many different groups did we do this with? Of course, the AMIGOS version with every AMIGOS group we encounter. But what about everyone else? Its like it has become alive this workshop of Sita and mine, born in a hot and sweaty staff house. Our intimacy with it makes it so much better, so much deeper, so much more relevant. And it makes us, as educators, so much more able to teach and to relate and to really listen.

Films with holes to open pedagogical spaces. Full of holes, and holes and emptiness coming to represent and becoming potential and energy and hope and power. Peter always goes on about this, and I feel it reflected in that one activity that Sita and I seem to always find in our lives, together or not.

I drew on my paper a couple of things:

The first was the numbers one through ten, representing ten weeks of youth media. And weaving in and out of them, holding them together, making them alive are squiggly lines of critical consciousness, hope, empathy, tolerance, compassion love, care, nonviolence, caring, respecting, celebrating… I can think of so many more.

I think the year Sita and I spent as the East Bay TDs are the most embodied moments I have of being an educator and really, really hardcore focusing on these things. Of really constructing and believing in our youth to be capable, beautiful, colorful beings. Of really feeding our own spirits by simply being and sharing and facilitating together. I don’t think either of us would consider ourselves teachers in that role. More like mentors, facilitators. What care and hope went into each activity planning. What love and spirit went into each retreat, each interaction, each moment we shared with the vols. I want to capture that and bring it with me always, to remind myself of the kind of facilitator I want to be.

Of course, we in class were talking about human rights and getting youth to identify human rights issues, and to name them. But similarly, we were trying to get these youth to name leadership capacities of those they work with (among a thousand other things). And that, I think they did. I wonder if being able to name those powerful qualities of leadership or wonder in others is just as valid in human rights ed as being able to name human rights issues or kinds of child labor. If we sent vols into communities knowing how to name human rights issues/violations, how would that affect them? I think I would rather they be able to name celebratory aspects of where they are. I think it has to do with their age- the potential they bring to their communities is about hope and love and compassion. And so I wanted them to be able to name hope, love, and compassion in a community so different from their own.

The other thing I drew underneath that list of ten numbers with little boxes around them and words weaving in between was a “picture” of the tension of value systems in youth media that happens in schools as opposed to after school, or the tension between educator and funder. There is a value system there- two, in fact, running at each other. We can use what youth give us as entry points into their lives, of course. Anything they give us? I think, but yes?

So we enter their lives via their videos. And the value system-educator-tension begins to play a role. What are they supposed to be doing, what are the goals, who needs what and what needs to happen?

But at the same time I think there can be- and should be- the flexibility to move through the canon freely, and to slip outside of it for the skilled educator who can navigate both school principle and funder in ways that address youth and address the powers that be/fulfill their needs.

I think if I could go into my youth media program with the same kind of wonder and hope and sheer excitement with which I entered AMIGOS vol training, truly amazing things could happen. its not that I don’t enter with wonder and excitement. its just that with AMIGOS, it was as though every bone in my body was wonder and excitement. With my project right now, I am more easily bogged down in a thousand other things that don’t pertain to the moment- teachers, principles, grades, guns, people who work for me. I need to relocate myself to the place of magic that AMIGOS training grew from. Its personal!
Lastly, this makes me want to do a youth media project next semester with the daughters of sweatshop workers to continue to build that body of work of mine that is being archived on sweatshop workers. Problem? I tried this a while ago and could not really find the right org to work with, or really an org that was working with sweatshops. Which of course, I need.

on Wendy Ewald and Born into Brothels: linguistics, gender, power, relation, hope… For they cannot be separated, can they?

I like Ewald’s books. I like her work, and her book has been useful to me as I teach photo, art, video to kids. I use it as a starting point, something to jump off of when I am feeling energized and creative, something to return to when things run amuk and get confusing and difficult. Not so much as a guiding light, more like a set of ideas and practices that are tried and true- lessons to fall back on, things that have worked in photo ed with kids all over and things I can make work if I need to. Importantly, though, they should be used to build from, not as a direct blue print.

Now- Born into Brothels. Its disturbing because it is so euro-centric in its approach to working with the kids and conceptualizing them. Everything is in relation to the center, this white woman teacher with an English accent. She is like the coming of the messiah, saving, trying to save, the martyr, the hope, the one working tirelessly who we can give our spare change to cover costs for… The little boy who stares into the distance, proclaiming the future for others and telling the stories they have given him in exchange for a vow of secrecy he violates. The photos, the bad video editing with childrens’ mouths moving, the subtitles adding 45 seconds later and the sound coming 45 seconds after that. Now come on. But back to the issues, the construction of this community as devestated, of the children as victims. CHildren who want to “get out,” who need education, who will end up working the line. It doesn’t validate the power and success of the families, communities, mothers, children. I’m not advocating that children don’t need access to education. but I am suggesting that that education may look very different than the eurocentric model, and most improtantly, I am suggesting that their community be constructed as powerful leaders in the fight for education.

Media is supposed to be transformatory, not martyrdom.I don’t care who you are, once you enter a relationship with children you have a responsibility to construct them as powerful cultural beings. You have a responsibility to imagine them, photograph and shoot video of them, that is empowering and hopeful. Soing so lets them somehow begin to aprtner with you in hope, to imagine power and to collaborate with others for power.

Radical opposite of the rat movie from last week, which is everything this has the potential to be.

And this is where I think Ewald needs to go beyond her photo curricula and think about linguistics, power, relation, hope…

For they cannot be separated, can they?

Educational Video Center: Creating with Youth- Whats Valid in a Learnign Setting to Say?

Today Steven Goodman, leader and founder of Educational Video Center, came and spoke today. I enjoyed his book and he language it was written in, and was excited to see him speak. What stood out to me though, and what I am still thinking about it is not the insights he shared and the wisdom he brought into the classroom, though of course that was very informative.

What stands out to me was my own reaction to the two videos we watched. We were asked to write a response to each, and here I have scanned my responses….

So the first page of response is about a video made by a girl living in an apartment building in East Harlem filled with rats and without hot water. Its a bit crude, its very organic- girl chewing gum, man drowning a rat in hot water, baby getting bathed- there is an every day realness about it that makes it accesible. It really makes true the whole thing, it makes it real and it forces on to feel the story, to imagine other stories, to recognize people you know in the film, to inspire. The girl organizes her building to ign a petition and the young people take it to the landlord. This process of organizing an action is so powerful, so moving. It shines light on the learning process, and you know that this girl is part of the making process of the video and that events are unfolding before the camera as they happen, in the moment, it feels like you are part of the action. And overwhelmingly, there is a sense of hope and of collaboration and of moving forward and of liveliness and learning. Its inspiring and accesible.

The second peice of paper is a film made more recently by youth about a Katrina survivor trying to rebuild her home. It is also interesting, and pretty much the story of one woman, whose home was destroyed and eventually bulldozed against her will. The story is about how she is trying to rebuild, the tragic bulldozing, and the pain that ensues. She is by herself, and she is alone.

The first word I wrote down was alone. How alone she is. I don’t even get a sense the camera is there. She is simply by herself, moving a hammer in her home to chip away at the old broken walls. Its odd, this alone-ness as she is chipping away at the house, like it is an unsurmountable task and even if she continues to peel tiny peices of sheet rock with her hammer she is never going to finish. Its like she is toiling. We learn she built the house from money she recieved from the death of daughter. We learn more about her and her story, and then the home is bulldozed by the govenment without her knowledge, and we get the sense the dream is destroyed, laid flat. She becomes powerless. We are left with this sense of pwoerlessness that makes us feel like there is nothing we can do, no hope, nowhere to turn because the government is building casinos and this unjust world we live in is beyond our control, beyond the grasp of justice, just spinning out fo control and leaving women to toil in broken homes alone.

It does not feel hopeful, like there is something that we can grasp, it makes me feel like we are all little ants in this giant world, swept under logs by gusts of wind, nothing to hold on to, not even each other.

Scarier, I felt in class like I should not say this, becuase this is an accomplishment for youth. Because maybe my reading was so completely off since my peers talked about its depth and level of tragedy… I felt like I had to re-justify everything I was saying, “Not to say it makes it less powerful, but…” I don’t know why I always feel like I need to make it ok, not say what I mean because I am worried people will either get offended or hate the ideas. I couldn’t clarify what I meant. Sometimes people just jump in so quickly I need a second to think about my reaction and then everyone else’s reaction matches and mine is like way over in left field, and I feel like its less than appropriate to say it or something, like it won’t be taken seriously or is not valid… Sometimes I could say tis hesitancy has to with gender, or with needing to be respected, or with a thousand other things, but….

To be continued. But right now I must edit.

Isn’t it strange- I just re-read the above paragraph and feel like I need to revisit this, even if it is a tangent…- that I feel often in most classes, including this very inclusive one, that I cannot contribute ecause it is not valid enough, not academic enough, not cool enough? For the first two years of college, I did not say more than ten words in any class. Even last year, I did not speak in Media Theory for half the class, till after the midterm. During the midterm, we all met informally. We read each others’ papers. We talked about ideas and I realized people were confused about certain concepts I understood, and I explained them. I read other papers and found out that while some people were most definitely brilliant, not everyone was, some of them I thought were pretty uncritical and lame. And they talked in class all the time. So we turned in the midterms and I got an A. And then one night I was at an AMIGOS reunion, the youth program I worked with as a teen and in college, and did youth media with. I was with them, and when I got to class right afterwards I realized “fuck it, say what you think.” From then on I spoke in class. I particpated. But always with a moment of pause. Since its gotten better. I particpate in all my classes, but there is always this moment where I wonder if I should say xy and z, where I second guess my particpation. About half the time I say it anyways, even though often it comes out garbled and confused and unclear and doesn’t sound so eloquent as it sounded in my head. The other half the time I decicide not to say it. Then, either someone else says it or I find myself sometimes frutrated because the point is missed and sometimes forgetting it and going with the flow. I wonder who else has this experience….

does it matter?

Why are we doing this? Specifically, why am I doing this? 

What is going to happen to the research I produce, to the youth I invest in, to the projects I envision?

Are they doomed like so much of the rest of academia to become dusty old collections of words that hold meaning only for others who fancy themselves people who think about youth media? How I detest research that does not serve a larger purpose. That fails to integrate into its existence the participatory action that grows out of collaboration with others. Yet at the same time, how does research on the ephemeral, the encounter, cultural poesis- how does this serve a large purpose, a greater need? Who benefits? 

When you make a beautiful piece of art, or write about love and care and hope, or make a stunning documentary like “The House is Black,” who sees, why do they see, and where- or what- is the purpose? Is the purpose of research that is experimental to move academia in new ways? Is moving academia to reconsider knowledge a valid purpose for academic research? Does moving academia in new ways result in moving society and the world in new ways? 

Is my thesis- about AMIGOS- going to move AMIGOS in new directions? Is it needed? Is it needed by the vols? By the youth? Surely the youth need to participate. The program needs to happen. It needs to happen because of human rights, of technological interventions, because our young people need experiences that allow them to read the world critically. 

But the research? Does theoretical research let us better that, or does grounded theory, practical experience hold more sway? Does it matter, will it go to extend this youth media project- which is quickly disapearing since Jon and I left? Will anyone listen, or does this simply serve as a massive excersersize in compromise and in theory and in academia for me? 

Is this going to change anything? Does sitting in a classroom hold any sway? Youth media practitioners don’t seem excited about enagaging with students or academics. There doesn’t seem to be a fluid conversation. How can they be bridged?

On Encounters

I just read an article by Kathleen Stewart that seems somehow deeply relevant to youth media. 

This is an interesting collection of fragments of emergent stories of collision and force, written poetically and in a fragmented, emergent manner. Stewart defines this cultural peosis to be the creativity or generativity in thinkgs cultural. the embodied affective experience, the still life moment when things resonate with both potential and threat. She seems to allude to this idea as an idea of encounter, a moment in which forces, bodies, and global energies come together to merge momentarily before drifting and shifting into new patterns and new affectations. 

“this is a time and place in which an emergent assemblage made up of wild mix of things- technologies, sensibilities, flows of power and money, daydreams,institution, ways of experiencing time and space, battles, dreams, bodily states, and innumerable practices of everyday life- has become actively generative, producing wide ranging impacts, effects, and forms of knowledge with a life of their own. This is what I mean by cultural poesis” (1028)

“What is going on? What floating influences now travel through public routes of circulation and come to roost in the seemingly private domain of hearts, homes, and dreams?” (1028)

“As previously public spaces and dorms of expression were privatized, previously privatized arenas of dreams, anxieties, agencies, and morals were writ large on public stages as scenes of impact” (1029)

“The figure of a beefed up agency became a breeding ground for all kinds of strategies of compliant, self destruction, flight, reinvigoration, and experimentation as if the world rested on its shoulders” (1036)

“The body is both the persistant site of self recognition and the thing tht will always betray you. It dreams of its own redemotion and knows better” (1036)

“The proliferating cultures of the body spin madly around the palpable promise that fears and pleasures and forays into the world can be literally made vital all-consuming passions” (1039)

In her coda, Stewart goes on to describe her purpose in sharing these story fragments, the “arbitrary scenes of impact tracked through bodies desires, or labors and traced out of the aftermath of a passing surge registered…” 1040). She claims that these are “actual sites where forces have gathered to a point of impact, or flirtations along the outer edges of a pheneomenan, or extreme cases that sugget where a trajectory might lead if it were to go unchecked” (1040). This is a fascinating way to think of the ways in which emergent encounters with forces and energies and others shape and construct moments of energy and pause. This kind of fragmented knowing reminds me of Latour and Tsing, and seems to echo Hayles concerns about the ways we are newly sensing the world via new media tech. Maybe Noddings ideas about care can shift into this paradigm, though I still wonder then what happens to the relationship, the extended knowing of another person or being or idea or thing that makes space for care to happen. If there are already extended caring relationships in the life of a young person, then does this kind of fragmented moment-encounter also relate, can we also produce care in a moment this way?

It is as if one if living in vignettes, jumping from moment to moment, reality to reality, RL to SL fluidly yet with an awareness of the disconnect that forms that fluidity. Its a representation of how the RL and virtual and SL interact to shape each other. I have a moment kissing my fiance as he puts on his coat before I re-fragment into SL where I am wearing a skimpy tee and dancing with some one I never met before I teleport over to a new sim and look at art as I pull the brownies out of the oven and the scent overwhelms me. As I check my email and gmail ads orient themselves to the words I type. All of these energies and forces… collide and exist together only momentarily, fundamentally shifting the way we read the world…