Alex Juhasz responds in Podcast form to "Look Deeper into the Migrant Experience"
We Need Gentle Truths for Now: Radical Digital Media Literacy as Podcast
-uniform soundscape
-Introduction:
Hi! I’m Alex Juhasz, and this is Episode Two of “We Need Gentle Truths for Now.” We engage in radical digital media literacy by enjoying a bite of education and a bit of poetry -- all about fake news.
This episode will focus on experiences of migrants from Central and South America during the Trump administration. It’s called, “Look Deeper into the Migrant Experience.” In a Manhattan art show in 2017, anthropologist Jason De León displayed items that immigrants had discarded near the U.S./Mexico border. I learned about Jason’s art show online. I was writing a primmer on fake news, and I was seeking evidentiary forms, outside of photography, to document and share truth. I was taken by how Jason was demonstrating another way out of the spiral of doubt that fuels fake news: displaying the real things that people have left behind.
Later, my project turned to its second iteration: Fake News Poetry Workshops. One of their key components is to slow down, so that we treat the things and people we encounter online with time, care, and respect. Demonstrating trust and connection with internet things is another way out of the doubt spiral. This will be evidenced in the intimate hand-off of works that follow, even as they are between strangers.
In 2019, Mike G participated in a Fake News Poetry Workshop. Mike G is a member of a collective of disabled poets in Manhattan. Like all participants, he was asked to respond to work in my primmer. He found the post about Jason De Leon’s art show and wrote a poem.
A while later, I was collecting poems created in these Workshops to be published in a book. I sent an email to Jason, who knew nothing about my project. In my email I shared Mike’s poem. Now Jason was inspired to respond. He recorded a soulful reading of Mike’s poem, as well as his response to Mike’s ideas.
Inspired by this connection between strangers, I forwarded Jason’s response to Mike, who responded by writing another poem distilling his knowledge and feelings about the migrant experience, about truth, and about connection.
This is the digital media literacy I seek. It exemplifies a spiral of attention, compassion, and intelligence that counters the logic of fake news.
First, you will hear a reading of the hardtruth that started this virtuous circle read by Gavin McCormick, this project’s copyeditor. Then Jason will read Mike’s original poem and his response to it. Finally, you will hear Mike’s poetic response to Jason.
-#Hard truth
Hard truth Number 31 is read by Gavin McCormick: “Look Deeper into the Migrant Experience”
University of Michigan anthropologist Jason De León’s “Undocumented Migration” project uses materials found on the U.S./Mexico border as fragments of history. Those materials reveal death, trauma, and suffering on both sides of the border, while bringing to light complexities of the migrant experience. De León writes: “Now, more than ever, in the aftermath of a presidential campaign that fed off anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric, it is absolutely critical to look deeper into the migrant experience and raise questions as to what the future may hold for the thousands of people fleeing dire poverty, drug cartel violence, and political instability to the south.”
In the hardtruth Alex Juhasz writes, “Photographs and other forms of evidence that flow effortlessly and in abundance across the internet as truths serve to build fake news and its real, violent manifestations. Things that we encounter online demand new holding environments with material depth, like Jason’s art show. This will allow for greater substantiation, authentication, and complexity. I celebrate Jason’s efforts to present the artifacts of migrants’ experiences. They help to reveal the devastating truth of our current immigration policies, which are built on deceptions.”
Juhasz adds that the show’s poetic approach does more than offer material proof of others’ misery. It also offers the kind of truths available only through alternative registers: the imagination, the aesthetic, the intellectual, the affective. These powerful verification machines are demonstrated in the poems and responses that follow.
Thank you for listening to Episode Two of “We Need Gentle Truths for Now: Radical Digital Media Literacy as Podcast.” Why have Fake News Poetry Workshops? Because they can feel like a better way of living and knowing social media. We invite you to live and know differently, by engaging. You can volunteer to read a poem or hardtruth. You can write a response to one of the poems or hardtruths. Or you can respond by creating your own art or poetry. You can also stage a digital workshop. Please email us at 100hardtruths@gmail.com. To learn more about the project see the embedded links.
-Outro: uniform soundscape
Outro text:
This podcast was produced, written, and read by Alexandra Juhasz. It was directed and edited by Matthew Hittle and copy edited by Gavin McCormick. Music and score were written by Noah Chevan. Additional readings are by Gavin McCormick, Jason de León, Mike G and Cathy J. Thank you for listening.