Campus Reboot

 

Presenter: Susan Cardillo

Registration Number: 001
Institution: University of Hartford, Connecticut, USA

Abstract: Campus Reboot is a crowd-sourced, interactive and collaborative web-based documentary project and course. The project will be a living document of the historical times of college during the Covid19 pandemic and its aftermath. Working with 15 colleges around the world, students created videos, based on prompts, to share their feelings about college during Covid. Campus Reboot allows students to not only create works that speak to the voice of their generation, in the midst of a historical pandemic, but it also allows students to work with the footage from other schools, around the world, to create a broader story of our times. According to Nichols (2001), documentary projects are about telling stories concerning our shared world and how we want it to be. This generation grew in participatory art, video and community to begin the discovery that documentary could be about making purposeful stories with people rather than just about them (Rose, n.d.). This project uses crowd-sourced documentary to tell important stories and create a rich learning environment. Collaborative, crowd-sourced and interactive sites are all examples of Participatory Media. Participatory sites such as Youtube have changed the landscape of digital video storytelling. It can also be argued that social media sites are the new breeding ground for both collaborative and crowd-sourced video work. Campus Reboot uses Youtube as a cloud-based participatory site for video uploads and currently Wix as its cloud-based website placeholder and Klynt interactive software to create the home base. Collaborative documentary allows the scope of the documentary to expand with the addition of user-generated content. User-generated content can be remixed, reworked, and built upon to enrich the story (Bhimani, 2012). According to the MIT Open Documentary Lab, collaborative or co-created documentaries interpret the world, and seek to change it, through a lens of equity and justice (Clark & Cizek, 2019). Enabling students to learn and create in this international environment affords them new ways to interpret, understand and engage in the world through the experiences and insights of their peers. With interactive documentary the viewer is invited to become a creative partner in the story. It also enables a global access at any time through many entrances, including social networks (Uricchio, 2019). All of these documentary styles come together in unison to help both students and instructors work in new and collaborative ways to tell important stories in Campus Reboot.

Bio: Dr. Susan Cardillo has a Doctorate of Computer Science in Emerging Media concentrating on Interactive Documentary (digital storytelling) for Social Change. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Journalism at the University of Hartford. Dr. Cardillo was recently awarded the Innovations in Teaching award, as well as the Women’s Initiative Fellowship at the University of Hartford. Her area of research is Interactive and Micro-Documentary for Social Awareness and Change. Campus Reboot is her latest work, in progress.

Screening Bodies: Women Watching Cinema in Post-Pandemic India.

 

Presenter: Damini Kulkarni
Registration Number: 046
Institution: Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India

Abstract: The advent of digitality has vastly reconfigured the ways in which cinema audiences negotiate with the metaphorical and literal distance between technologies of cinematic representation and their everyday lives. As audiences come to own the screens on which they consume cinema, holding them close to their bodies and identities, the films they watch on them interact in complex and diverse ways with their embodied sense of self. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to violently underscore both, the precariousness and the pre-eminence of corporality, audiences’ bodily engagement with these screens is apt to undergo a range of shifts. When India attempted to control the spread of the disease with the most stringent lockdown in the world, audiences of a nation that has been famous for its fevered penchant for cinema confronted locked theatres: people with the privilege of access to digital technology turned to screens that were accessible within their homes or other safe spaces. This study examines the gendered dimensions of these audiences’ embodied interactions with the digital screens on which they watched cinema while enduring the COVID-19 pandemic. In the process, the study attempts to underline the interplay between gendered identity and the affordances of the digital in the face of widespread inaccessibility to public spaces of film exhibition. Heightened focus on corporal vulnerability in public discourse in the wake of the pandemic, coupled with large, intricate and interconnected changes that the threat of the disease triggered in the material realities of the everyday life of women, led to a reconfiguration in their relationship with the devices on which they watched cinema. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with over forty women from predominantly urban India over the course of two months, this study finds that these reconfigurations have primarily proceeded along three axes: shifts in the linguistic and ideological rubric within which the body’s investment in the digital screen is emplaced, emergence of new constellations of women’s communities around cinema, and increased introspection among women about the kind of cinema they watch on the digital screens, and the way in which it impacts their gendered identity. Since most of the interviews were conducted remotely, the study also gestures towards some methodological implications associated with conducting a study of audiences consuming cinema on digital devices via predominantly digital channels. The study also outlines the epistemic implications for the process arriving at a philosophy of the digital in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Bio: Damini Kulkarni is currently pursuing her PhD in Media and Communication Studies as a UGC Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Media and Communication Studies in Savitribai Phule Pune University. Her research interests include popular cinema, cinema spectatorship, Hindi film audiences, film philosophy and questions of gender and representation in cinema. Her work has previously appeared in publications such as Film International, Film Criticism, Economic and Political Weekly, Scroll.in, Critical Collective, and Himal Southasian, among others. Her poems and short stories have appeared in publications such as Vayavya, Mad Swirl, and New Woman, among others.