Section 7: MAPP In Camera

The Media, Activism and Participatory Politics (MAPP) Project was already up and running when I joined the team in 2013. Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber Thompson, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik and Arely Zimmerman were conducting five case studies of youth-driven and youth-focused communities engaging in new forms of political engagement and action that were reflective of contemporary participatory media practices. The work was supported by the MacArthur Foundation through its Digital Media and Learning initiative and as part of its Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP) Research Network.

I came onto the project at a time when the findings from the case studies were being finalized and worked into a book, By Any Media Necessary: The New Activism of American Youth, which would be published in 2016. As that was happening the team recognized that the book required an online companion site that could archive and showcase the diverse media artifacts related to the case studies. My initial role was to help design and implement this video-centric digital archive. Simultaneously, the team recognized that the skills and practices they had observed and documented across the communities represented in the case studies would be of great utility to other groups and communities who might not already be aware of those practices of have the resources to learn and adapt them on their own for their particular needs. We reimagined the online companion piece to be more than just a media archive but to also include resources that would help spread the skills and practices of various communities across new networks.

This meant that as we were building the media archive we were also designing, testing and producing new approaches to collaborative storytelling and media making. One of the key insights from the case studies was the powerful potential of leveraging shared narrative spaces for their potential for engagement and support of user- and story-driven approaches to learning media making.

Islamic Center of Southern California

Our first key collaboration was with a summer youth leadership program at the Islamic Center of Southern California in June, 2013. We worked with programmers there to propose a week-long storytelling and media making workshop that would harness pop-culture and media making. I worked closely with Sangita Shresthova and Karl Bauman on this project and our key collaborator at the Islamic Center was Susu Attar. The USC team’s initial thinking was that we needed to frame the creative practices we wanted to explore through questions of identity, activism and political agency. Ms. Attar’s key insight was that what the youth community at the Islamic Center really needed was the opposite; a space and framework that allowed and encouraged them to engage with creativity and imagination without politicizing their efforts at all because they so often found their most basic identities politicized simply by virtue of the fact that they are Muslim Americans.

I had previously worked with Alex McDowell running worldbuilding workshops for youth as part of the 5D Science of Fiction events and proposed that a worldbuilding approach would be a useful way to organize the kind of shared narrative collaborations we wanted to utilize with the young learners of the Islamic Center. After some introductory activities with the group of students who ranged in age from about 9 to 16 years old, we ran a boisterous brainstorm generating a shared vision of a future fantastical world where anything was possible. Ideas included knowledge-spitting lions, lunar travel, Transformers and more. Students worked in small groups to flesh out individual stories that would take place under the larger umbrella of this shared world. The emphasis was on narrative at this point, not production. As part of our introduction we had done a short media-making activity with very little instruction, just a key word prompt based on an emotion and constraints about how small teams would try to convey that emotion visually using easy-to-use handheld video cameras.

After the groups shared back their stories with the larger group, we brainstormed about how they could stage and capture their stories on video. This phase of the work resembled the approach that the Junior AV Club team had taken with the Summer 2011 cohort. We identified the goals of the participants and then reverse engineered a plan that would support those goals. We supported their efforts with basic instructions about how to operate the cameras and how to organize their efforts with a schedule that would facilitate getting all of the elements they needed. But all of these steps were driven by the instincts and creative impulses of the students, not by a top-down approach to video production that dictated from the start what best practices would entail and what proper framing and aesthetic conventions might require.

Over several days the young learners worked in groups and with MAPP team members’ support to plan, script, shoot and edit their projects. We decided that a TV News style frame would create an easy way to link the stories together so the older students in the group took on the roles of news anchors, planning and scripting interstitial news desk sequences and exercising editorial oversight to ensure that each of the story pieces the other groups produced could be knit together into a resulting piece called ‘Future News.’

At each stage of the work we witnessed the ways in which video practice supported the learning and team building of the young participants. Their goals for audio visual production provided a framework for them to organize their efforts and interactions. They created and articulated amongst themselves a vision of the world that they wanted to be able to see and depict visually and they worked together to bring that into reality. There were creative challenges, compromises and complicated decisions to make at every stage and they met each moment with the full application of their best efforts because they were each engaged with the process and the strength of their desire to do a good job.

When the work was done and watched together as a group the students had a new way of seeing and relating to each other. Video making results in an external object of self, reflecting the makers and the watchers and serving again as an interface between sets of relationships, be they personal, political, technologic. This was the case when, after twice viewing the finished ‘Future News’ video show we sat in a circle for a reflective conversation. Students talked about what they liked, what was funny, what surprised them, what had been challenging. One exchange stood out amongst the others and centered around the depiction of an explosion in a vignette made by a group of girls who also happened to be amongst the youngest of the production teams.

In their story, babies inexplicably began to fall from the sky. At first, people in the story dealt with the phenomenon by finding adoptive homes for the skyfallen infants. Pretty soon though the babies caused a new problem as they began to explode. To visualize the explosions in the stories, the young members of the group searched through explosion videos on YouTube and chose a black and white military film depicting a hydrogen bomb test explosion in the Pacific Ocean. The enormity of the explosion matched and emphasized the enormity of the absurdity of the story, and this was more or less the way that the girls explained their choices when questioned about them in the reflection phase of the workshop.

Another student in the workshop, a young man in middle school, was polite with his feedback but clearly bothered by the explosion. When encouraged to expand on his reaction, he explained that in his opinion, as a Muslim, you just can’t depict the explosion of any bomb. The girls who made the video did not understand the critique, to them, it was simply funny and only done for the sake of humor. He went on to assert that if they had experienced the kind of name calling and harassment about terrorists and bombers that he had experienced they would not think it was funny either.

It was a difficult and nuanced conversation to have and it touched on subjectivity, artistic integrity, the question of an author’s responsibility to an audience (and whether they have one) and ultimately it allowed the community to address the unjust realities of the ways in which they as individuals face stereotypes and intolerance because of their religious affiliation. Video making was only one tool within the larger creative practice deployed in the workshop, but it provided a powerful medium for this emergent discourse amongst the young participants.

Throughout this process we also used video for our own observations and project documentation. Bauman and Shresthova both also have backgrounds in video and documentary production and felt it was natural to integrate pervasive use of cameras into the work. We introduced this aspect of our practice from the beginning and let all participants know that we would often be shooting video as we talk and work and make. The cameras could blend away into the fabric of the experience that way. Because of this approach to integrated video making we have a record of that conversation about bombs, humor and muslim identity.

Our research group didn’t take that piece of video, edit it into a short documentary and share it online. We didn’t publish it at all. The moment itself, the exchange had a powerful impact on our sense of the work, our goals and the importance of making space for creativity and imagination within the midst of the complex currents of political and personal identity where we were working. We discussed that moment and embedded it in our shared memories. Revisiting the video record itself continues to be a powerful experience of renewal, keeping that memory larger than the internal, more than a written account, something that exists in and out of linear time, that lives with color and voice and body language and nuance of circumstance that are all unique to the representational capacities of video in general and of the small handheld high definition video camera in particular that was running that day.

Children’s Defense Fund’s Freedom School

Video practice continued to be an important part of this phase of the MAPP project’s work and I strove to make an impactful contribution to the work by continually looking for ways to make that process vital, responsive and uniquely suited to the needs of the community, the goals of the work and the context of the larger YPP research network. All of us working in MAPP knew there was another way that video making could have lived alongside the academic work of the team; it could have been just that, ‘alongside,’ something carried out amidst yet external to the work, by a team of collaborators or an individual always not quite a full participant in the rest of the project’s motivations, character and methods. Video practice could have been occasional, incidental and driven by tightly defined and scripted deliverables. I have seen and even participated in that kind of production and known that it can be something of a nuisance, production something to be endured as a means to an end, the end generally being a marketing tool that never quite lives up to the full promise or character of the work.

We ran a second workshop that same summer just after that with the Islamic Center. This time we engaged with a larger group of mostly high school aged students participating in a summer long program of the Children’s Defense Fund’s Freedom School focused on teaching the tools and skills of community organizing and activism. The folk running the Freedom School we worked with in Los Angeles were doing an amazing job of creating a learning community with clearly defined values, goals and standards. The learners they were working with were from working-class Latino families and the whole program of the summer was designed to empower and validate that community. As such, the organizers were very deliberate and conscientious about the ways they invited us to participate, mitigating the possibility that we would descend on the program as a group of outside experts bringing our knowledge to the underprivileged masses.

Our approach was successful. We came to the program, shared a bit about who we were, and then we listened, created a space for creativity as we had with the learners at the Islamic Center and once again let the creativity and the stories of the young people lead the approach to how we supported their learning of video practice. We did not realize that our approach was radical in a lot of ways until we invited a visitor to participate in one of the shoot days. This individual was someone we knew and were planning to collaborate, he was an experienced media artist and educator who had done extensive community-based media projects. We explained our approach to video practice and pedagogy and our deliberate inclination to step back and let the students figure it out for themselves. But he couldn’t help himself but to step in when he saw students who weren’t doing things ‘the right way’; who weren’t getting a proper frame or exposure; who weren’t covering a scene with the best strategic approach. We tried to facilitate a smooth collaboration but his actions grated against the values of the community and caused some tension. We didn’t collaborate further with him or his organization, but we did get another valuable perspective into our own practices.

It made me appreciate all the more an experience I had with that same group of students. I was observing and supporting them as they were staging and videoing a scene that involved four people sitting in chairs talking, two on one side facing two on the other side. I could have explained the conventional way of shooting a master then going in for coverage in twos and singles. But they were deeply engaged in the work and exhibiting no signs of frustration or fatigue. They had a clear vision amongst themselves of what they wanted to see, of the story they wanted to tell. We had made the tools available to them and showed them the basic ways of using them; they had a camera on a tripod and knew how to get sound and picture with it. From there they figured out for themselves what it means to cover a scene. I saw the moment when it clicked for them that the the apparent contiguity of diegetic reality they’d seen all their lives in single-camera TV and movies is an illusion constructed from discrete temporal and spatial records of reality. I saw them discover that you could set the camera up and run the entire scene from that position, then stop recording, move it to a new location and run the entire scene again from this new vantage point. I didn’t tell them how to do that, they figured it out for themselves and it became knowledge that they owned, something they achieved together. It might seem like the most basic of cine-linguistic skills but as a conceptual practice it is a profound leap.

Webinars, Installations, Meetings and Beyond

Over the following three years video practice continued to be an important part of my work with MAPP and the video material coming out of that work is now an important part of the archive from which In Camera is derived. In early 2014 MAPP organized and conducted a series of four webinars on Storytelling and Digital-Age Civics in partnership with Connected Learning TV and Youth Radio. The webinar is a familiar format in our academic community and in and of itself is an interesting video practice. After the series ended our team discussed memorable moments from amongst the hours of conversations. I went through the archived material and began to edit together those pieces of collective memory into watchable and accessible collections of excerpts. We went further in our imagining of what the afterlife of such a work could be and I worked with Sangita Shresthova to create a multi-channel video installation experience, My Story/Our Story.

We continued making video when we created new workshops and ran our worldbuilding workshops in Boston, San Francisco, Portland and Kansas. We grew our network of activists, scholars and educators and shared powerful moments of video memory with our colleagues from the YPP research network at annual meetings and convenings. We finished the byanymedia.org online resource and media archive and I integrated my experiences as part of this knowledge production community into my personal identity. Our work was ever concerned with the interplay between personal storytelling, community building, political agency and new forms for participation aimed at making the world a better place. The tools and practices of technology are intimately linked to all of these larger processes and our most personal and private lives are equally embedded in the larger currents of social, cultural and political systems. Video is an important tool for seeing, making and sharing ourselves. My video work in the world feeds into the places I call home and the private moments I reflect on where I am, who I am, who I want to be, where I want to go. Keeping that self, myself, awake to the tools and currents makes me better able to step into the larger conversations, contribute to the evolution of visual language and practice, to seek out the moments at which we might push against the forms and technologies being handed us and be always active and alert to what might be better.