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.

Book or Music Video?: How Own Voices Picture Books Revolutionized Verbal and Visual Media.

"If you think writing for children is just practice for writing for grown-ups, think again. [Children] can spot a fraud a mile away." Andrew Melrose

Presenter: Pavlina Ferfeli
Registration Number: 016
Institution: University of Athens, Greece

Abstract: This paper examines the staggering rejuvenation of children’s picture books in the last decade, as a direct result of emerging narratives that celebrate racial identity, underrepresented culture, and heritage at the point of extinction. Awarded works such as Kwame Alexander’s The Undefeated, Carole Lindstrom’s We are Water Protectors, and Tami Charles’ All Because You Matter, push the boundaries of children’s literature to its limit, by challenging concepts related to appropriacy, narrative structure, subject matter, iconicity, and reception. Simultaneously, the Covid pandemic influenced the children’s publishing world no less than the “Own Voices” picture book, contributing to an entirely new landscape in the domain of digital storytelling. In a post-pandemic world, we witness a dramatic change in the practices of most publishing houses, which dare to explore uncharted copyright territory, and graciously grant more permissions to writers, teachers, and librarians to share picture book content through various media platforms. The combination of the momentum of the “Own Voices” picture book and the newly emerging licensing landscape had amazing repercussions in both storytime reception and children’s publishing dynamics.  Apart from an unprecedented boost of sales, rise in readership, and the founding of new imprints, the very fact that in digital read-aloud storytime a staggering amount of artistic media intersect, leads to the birth of a hybrid new genre – that of the picture book video. However, although this uncharted intermedial territory of “Own Voices” picture book video is one to follow, there are additional voices raised that speak of cacophony. In March 2021, BIPOC young adult author Rin Chupeco made an unusually poignant remark. Unhesitatingly sincere, Chupeco tweeted that the #ownvoices picture book has been metamorphosed into a punitive “cudgel” used on the part of publishers. The tweet soon gathered thousands of likes, raising a fiery and challenging question: Has the “Own Voices” literary edifice painstakingly erected itself into a prison cell with bars of freedom?

Pavlina Ferfeli portrait 

by Lily Kapetanaki

Pavlina Ferfeli is an independent scholar from Greece who was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Athens for her work on the American poet Mina Loy. Her academic work has been presented, published, and reviewed internationally. Her monograph Poetics of Identity: Mina Loy Voicing the Fluid Female Body, is available from Peter Lang. She has been awarded various poetry prizes, notably from the British Council, and forms an active member of SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and illustrators). Her research interests include postcolonial theory, corporeality, representation, and the semiotic intersections between poetry and the fine arts, with a special focus on media and media art.

Indigenous and Migrant Embodied Cartographies: Mapping the Inter-relations of the Odeimin Runners Club.

Presenters: Debbie Ebanks Schlums, Adrian Kahgee, and Rebeka Tabobondung
Registration Number: 045
Institution: York University and MUSKRAT Magazine, Toronto, Canada
Abstract: The Odeimin Runners Club is a new Indigenous and Black-Persons-of-Colour (BPOC) media collective creating an online story map using an open-source satellite mapping platform. By tracing activities and connections in our engagements with each other and our communities, our counter-mapping project re-traces trade and ceremonial routes between the north of Turtle Island and the Caribbean archipelago, linking stories, videos and artworks to traditional territories. Our objective in this first project phase is to make short films using Bolex film cameras and process cinema methodologies that incorporate plants and organic materials in film processing. The short films are themed on human survival, land connection, rematriation, and BIPOC counter-mapping as a means to thread our knowledges and stories together as we visit each other’s territories in order to connect and share traditional wisdom that imparts important knowledge and strength to help navigate current political and environmental instabilities facing our communities. As a collective of Ogimaakwe—women warriors, Indigenous and Caribbean—we have rejected a decolonial framework. Beyond the “decolonization is a metaphor” critique outlined by Tuck and Yang (2012), we argue that decolonization inherently embeds failure because it is premised on the one hand, on a defeated peoples, and on the other, on achieving or restoring a way of living, working and being in the world prior to colonization. Instead, we propose an a-colonial approach based on odeimin teachings. Odeimin means heartberry, or strawberry, and it grows and thrives by sending out runners, creating a networked lattice of relations between individual plants. These plants are a metaphor for individuals and communities—one cannot survive disconnected from relations with each other. A framework of Odeimin Teachings converges with what Eades and Zheng (2016) refer to as a “resisting practice,” with the ethos of Marcus Garvey’s self-reliant philosophy and strategy. This a-colonial framework resists oppressive capitalist systems while taking a different path: one outside of colonialism’s hegemonic frameworks. This project shows contemporary relations on a continuum rather than as “new encounters,” outside the language of discovery and within a concept of time immemorial, activating and re-activating the long ties between Indigenous communities, between Black and Indigenous peoples on the mainland and between the islands and the mainlands. This is not to discount the contested position of immigrants as settlers on the territory, but to say that we can build a different relationship outside of a white colonizing paradigm, one that might be less attached to ownership of land. The purpose of this project is to ground our cultural identities in the land of northern and rural Ontario—land that has been dispossessed through colonization by which Indigenous and Black POC’s histories were buried or made invisible as if we did not belong.

Bio: Debbie Ebanks Schlums
Debbie Ebanks Schlums is an art-researcher, PhD student and Vanier Scholar in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. Her research explores methodologies of Caribbean diasporic archiving in the Jamaican Diaspora through storytelling and media installation. Debbie is a recipient of the Susan Crocker and John Hunkin Scholarship in the Fine Arts, and Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council grants. She was a founding member of the Out of a War Zone and To Lemon Hill Collectives, both addressing the Syrian refugee crisis. She is a former Co-Director of the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film and Co-Producer of Saugeen Takes on Film.

Bio: Adrian Kahgee
Adrian Kahgee, (Saugeen First Nation), founding member of Odeimin Runner’s Club, is an artist and Community Arts Educator, currently teaching Visual Arts and Indigenous Studies, with the Bluewater District School Board. She is former Co-Artistic Director and Community Co-ordinator for the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film. Adrian is Co-Producer of Saugeen Takes on Film, a community-based film program working with artisans, youth and knowledge keepers from her community. Her current artistic practices, of painting, performance activated installations and film, are centered around continuous research, exploration, and sharing of familial and communal knowledge, on our existence upon Turtle Island since time immemorial. Her work has been featured at Creemore Festival of the Arts, Reel World Film Festival, imagineNATIVE, FADO, ANDPVA and CBC Radio.

Bio: Rebeka Tabobondung
Media and story creator Rebeka Tabobondung is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MUSKRAT Magazine.com, a leading digital Indigenous arts and culture magazine established in 2010. Rebeka is also a filmmaker, writer, poet, and Indigenous knowledge researcher with a strong body of work focused on Indigenous birth knowledge. Since 2017, Rebeka has been working as a creator, researcher, and writer with award winning Montreal based Rezolution Pictures, who along with APTN are partners in the Spirit of Birth web series and interactive Spirit of Birth mobile App and digital platform. In 2011, Rebeka produced and directed the short doc, Spirit of Birth in partnership with the National Screen Institute, which screened across Canada and internationally. Rebeka’s written works are published in numerous books, journals, and anthologies.