Abst May 10 | VisionsofChange

ABSTRACTS

May 10th, 2022

Panel A: Creative Media for Social Change

From the classroom to the newsroom: A critical route to introduce AI in Journalism education

Presenter: Leslie Salgado

University of Calgary

The history of Journalism is packed with moments of technological disruption; from telephone to satellite television, innovations have heavily influenced news production, distribution and reception. However, the impact of the current wave of Artificial Intelligence technologies arrives in a complex scenario. Journalism has become a struggling industry due to big tech companies taking most advertising revenues, an outdated business model, and a public trust crisis. How the current reality impacts Journalism education is a question that scholars have been trying to answer in the last few years. The incorporation of AI training in the Journalism curriculum arises among the answers to address the challenges of integrating the latest technological innovations in the newsrooms and navigating a challenging context. Based on a self-training method using available online free courses for journalists and the review of university teaching initiatives, this presentation proposes some recommendations to introduce AI in the Journalism curriculum covering both the applied and the critical perspectives. The recommendations include a critical route to reflect on what entails teaching Journalism students to think critically on AI and, at the same time, use the available tools for reporting and investigating in a difficult context where Journalism is at the edges.

Envisioning Better Futures Through Creative Initiatives in Guachené, Colombia

Presenter: Maira Cristina Castro Mina

Simon Fraser University

In the past decades several grass roots organizations and activists have implemented a wide variety of creative initiatives around several regions of Colombia to promote social change. In particular, creative strategies have yielded positive outcomes in urban neighborhoods that experience high levels of youth violence (Alzate, 2012). A case in point is the transformation in Comuna 13, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city of Medellin. In 2003 a group artists and activists began to organize as series of community engagement initiatives to promote artistic production s among its residents. Nowadays, this neighborhood is widely known as an example of successful social transformation through art. It attracts more than 20,000 tourists per week who want to experience the unique hip-hop and graffiti art produced by its residents In response to theme of this conference, I will first discuss the strategies used in Comuna13 to envision how they could be applied to the community of Guachené, an Afro-Colombian town located in the Cauca Province of Colombia. Guachené is known for its rich heritage and cultural traditions. However, in the past decade the lack of economic and professional opportunities for youth has led to an increase in gang activity in the region. Building from Comuna 13 experience, I will conclude this presentation by discussing advances of a community engagement project which I am currently developing along with Cristian Alesi Gonzalez, a local artist and grassroots organizer, to introduce youth from Guachené to dance, theater and digital media for social impact. This project is part of my MA degree that studies the impact of cultural and community grass roots projects in racialized regions affected by social conflict.

S/KIN BERLIN

Presenter: Alexa Vachon

Ryerson University

In opposition to the ‘rational’ and ‘objective’ proposition of knowledge as 'knowing-that,' embodied knowledge is the experiential practice of 'knowing-how.' Drawing on Natalie Loveless’ inquiries in and through research-creation (otherwise known as practice-based research or multimodal-research), I look to affective knowledge as prediscursive, generative, and contagious; an intangible experience through visually mediated bodily encounters. 'S/KIN BERLIN: 52.49° N, 13.42° E' is a photo-based project about people and bodies in revolt. The images focus on the body as a site of rebellion through which to interrogate themes of power, oppression, agency, and opposition. It considers what we do to our bodies consensually and non-consensually, but also what our bodies are subject to at the hands of others. The work examines synthesis as a practice of knowledge translation–using embodied communication through photographs that in turn 'effect' the 'affect' of an audience. Through the lens of critical disability studies, the work explores the harsh realities of physical limitations alongside the potential celebration of bodies in motion, and intimate collaborative practices. 'S/KIN BERLIN' examines my artistic practices, accountability and culpability, looking at how I use the camera as a voyeur, enabling exhibitionism and living in solidarity while I explore the role of catalyst and ally. The manipulated images examine the traces on our bodies, both visible and invisible, highlighting the relationship between enabler and collaborator. The work focuses on agency in its precarious forms, challenging the audience’s assumptions of acceptability by unashamedly centering performance, gender identity, and sexual exploration. The format of this talk is a first person narrative, including photographs, audio, and video (TBD) in a multimedia presentation.

Panel B: Public Discourse and Power

A political-economic analysis of Calgary’s bids for the 1988 and 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (OPWG): What changed?

Presenter: Matthew Halajian

University of Calgary

Today, the Olympic Games are an irrefutably controversial event, particularly for the chosen host city, because of the frequently (and long-lasting) negative impacts that the event has had on host city populations in recent decades: low-income populations are displaced, billions of dollars are spent on facilities that are used far too infrequently after the Games are gone, and the host city accepts an all-too disproportionate amount of risk in their agreement with the International Olympic Committee to host the Games, among other concerns; nevertheless, many cities, such as Calgary in 2017, persist and seek to welcome the five-ring circus to town. My long-talk will address my current research, as part of the fulfillment of my Master’s Thesis at the University of Calgary, which analyzes contemporary Olympic bids and the Olympic bidding processes and the key role that the media industries play in political-economic relationships surrounding an Olympic bid. Thus, my long-talk presentation will discuss my current research-project-in-process that seeks to answer the question, “How did the political economy of the local media industry shape the public’s response to the Calgary bid for the 2026 OPWG, and how was this different from their response to the 1988 OPWG bid?”. My long-talk presentation will cover trends in the relevant scholarly literature, the contemporary state of the Olympic bidding process, the importance and application of political-economic theory to the Olympic bidding process, and preliminary data from original research conducted as part of my Master's Thesis. Additionally, my long-talk will address and incorporate BIPOC, LGBTQ2S+, feminist and minority perspectives by considering the composition of my bibliography, the implications of bidding for an OPWG with the intent of hosting on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta, the pre-, during and the post-Olympics impact these facilities would have on the communities they are built within, and more.

Towards a ‘Digital Ethnography’ of Student Politics: Reflections from Delhi University amid the Global Pandemic

Presenter: Soumodip Sinha

University of Delhi

New forms of communicative action have emerged with the growth of network society and have lent new meanings and dimensions to the existing public sphere. With the outbreak of the COVID–19 Pandemic, unprecedented changes have rapidly ushered in across the globe and have significantly altered the course of human social life. As a consequence, ways of doing politics and thereby methods of doing research on the same are also in flux. Using cues from student politics in Delhi University, this paper examines how social media has become an integral part of the repertoire of campus politics especially since the onset of the Global Pandemic. Students have been effecting socio-political changes worldwide via modes and practices that include street activism and digital activism. Relying on content analysis of social media accounts of student organizations operating in the University and interviews with student activists between March 2020 and July 2021, the paper makes a sincere attempt at ‘digital ethnography’. It demonstrates that the virtual field has not only become a field of competition but also a principal site for doing fieldwork. That, activists prefer to operate in a hybrid mode wherein the online medium harmonizes with street protests and does not substitute it, is addressed. Against this background, this paper also demonstrates how student politics in Delhi University adapted to such alterations and adopted a hybrid form during this phase. In doing so it examines how social media can be conceptualized as a ‘new theatre of political action’, re-configuring the public sphere. That social media platforms are tools of political action together with being means for communicative action as well as repositories for data collection, is argued. Relying on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework of capital, this paper attests that such a process enables student politicians to possess and accumulate ‘digital capital’.

Using Education as Means to Combat the Pynamics of Power to Facilitate a Well-Functioning Polis

Presenter: Halle Bodnarchuk

University of Calgary

Education has been used a means to better civilizations since the beginning of evolution. Many species use various forms of teaching to facilitate learning and aid in the progression of the development. As education has undergone rapid growth since the implementation of educational institutions, the curriculas are being designed to create a homogenous population that adheres to government’s goal of a uniformity. Those who cannot meet the standards of homogeneity are immediately turned into cultural outcasts and provided little opportunity to improve those the societal approved skills, or explore other fields that they may excel in. Rather than being use as a device to foster passion and intellectual diversity, education is viewed as the requirement for the pre-determined responsibilities based on the relevant societal powers. My research findings indicate that our society has established and continues to implement an education system that works in favor of the capitalist mentality. As a result, people use those around them as their means to an end with the intention to secure their personal individualistic desires. The societal elite has begun using words like creativity and entrepreneurship to shift the citizens gaze towards a particular kind of social hierarchy that serves the needs of capitalism and maintains their social, political, and economic powers. Through the readings of various influential philosophers and understanding the Scandinavian social and education system, I believe that Canada requires an educational reform to combat power dynamics impacting thought and behavior. Our current system is reinforcing negative and degrading societal norms that establishes and fortifies racism and prejudices. These forms of teaching are then being implemented in our formal institutions, laws, and government causing oppression to various groups in our society. By understanding human nature and the relationship between the process of “normalization” (a process in which takes for granted certain standards, conventions, assumptions), a better awareness can be established to aid in creating an intellectually diverse and harmonious nation.

Panel C: Decolonizing Media

Listening as Transformation

Presenter: Emily Collins

York University

Located within a theoretical framework of care, deep listening, and decolonial listening, my paper provides a comprehensive study of Mike MacDonald’s Butterfly Gardens which have been planted across Turtle Island, including many urban spaces, from 1995-2003, often nearby art centres and public galleries. MacDonald was a Mi’kmaq artist born in Sydney, Nova Scotia whose self-taught practice focused on the environment and the natural world through video installation and multimedia art. Calling attention to environmental and social issues, he planted traditional Indigenous medicinal plants in these gardens to attract butterflies. Originally planting over twenty, today only one of these living artworks remain, outside the Walter Philips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta. While recognized within the visual, media, and social practice arts communities, MacDonald’s work is less known within sound studies, and yet sound has always been a key interlocutor for his artistic practice. In relation to this conference’s central investigative theme of envisioning change, my paper engages with the transformative, reparative, and caring imperatives at the centre of MacDonald’s gardens through its sonic characteristics. I argue that these artworks are sites of sonic intervention and resistance, structuring our engagement with the sounding world and listening practices – to the land, butterflies, and ourselves. In situating these gardens as more than a response to resource extraction but spaces to assert an Indigenous, multi-sensory, and decolonial approach to the environment, perception and urban spaces, my project reshapes their aesthetic, ethical and political dimensions. While the COVID-19 global lockdowns have created more space for contemplation, causing many to (re)turn attention to their gardens and outdoor areas, MacDonald had already been thinking about the ways in which gardens call people to slow down, especially within bustling urban settings and consider our interconnection and interdependence to all things. By inserting these intimate spaces into city life, MacDonald makes space for (self)-care and transformation, reflecting on how we relate to other species and how we can take care of ourselves in a simultaneous and overlapping experience of learning, listening, and healing.

Indigenous Sovereignity and Neocolonialism: Corporate Extractionism, Critical Infrastructure, and the Crown

Presenter: Miklós P. Somorjai

University of Winnipeg

I am interested in presenting a long talk on the issues of Indigenous land sovereignty, media representation, and silently enacted legislative acts. As a current student of the Cultural Studies Masters Program, I have taken a great interest in acts of resistance that have taken place in Canada, particularly in the current climate of COVID and concerns over energy security. I have conducted research into the Wet’suewet’en land struggle, and the actions of the RCMP. This has a strong parallel to current land struggles going on closer to my home of Winnipeg, where Camp Morningstar of the Hollow Water First Nation has been engaged in a struggle to prevent silica sand extraction from the territory. While there has not been RCMP action and presence in Hollow Water to the extent that the Wet’suewet’en defenders have experienced, colonial legislative acts have been moving forwards to try to prevent resistance. This is in the legacy of actions that the federal and provincial government have taken in contravention of the intent of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and tremendous concern is actions that are being taken legislatively and legally that may escape notice of the general public. Media exclusion zones despite court orders in Wet’suewet’en territory, Bill 1, Alberta’s Critical Infrastructure Defence Act passed in 2020, and Manitoba’s Bill 57, the Protection of Critical Infrastructure Act - which was passed during the height of COVID under a veil of secrecy – are all greatly concerning to citizens. I would like to bring these issues to greater light, as these are contemporary issues that effect everyone, not “simply” those who will bear the burden of extractive industrial projects for the purported greater good. It is crucial that the underlying motives and interests of those greenlighting mega-projects are investigated further, in order to showcase how the colonial legacy is continuing to this day. My desire is to present a 10 to 15 minute talk based on time available during the conference, to share the results of my previous research as well as my future intents to investigate these issues further, and ideally conduct future collaborative research with academics, journalists, land defenders and rights advocates.

Screen Confuturations: Decolonising Casting through Inclusive Design

Presenter: Kyna Morgan

University of Glasgow

As we commonly see performative solidarities and representations that do not pose a liberatory challenge to entrenched storytelling infrastructures, authenticity is of marked importance, but other methods and processes may also help form a new social imaginary. This work-in-progress challenges how marginalized communities are treated and represented in film and television narratives by proposing a new structuring of the process of casting in conversation with inclusive design, a practice that considers, and, by definition, includes differences and needs across a range of identities and ontological experiences. To instigate this enquiry, I propose the term confuturation (a portmanteau of ‘configuration’ and ‘futuring’) as a way to imagine decolonising representations and the processes behind them. Casting in film and television is considered through a lens of inclusive design practice to carry out a futuring process of ‘putting people’s current struggles into a future framework’ (Gheerawo 2021) and explores the possibilities of casting design that is collaborative, contributive, and reparative. Inspired by the question presented by designer Rama Gheerawo, ‘Why shouldn’t people be authors of their own solution?’ (2021), this paper asks: In what ways might we imagine the casting process to be creatively generative and socially liberatory?

Panel D: Queer Representations

Awareness and Hope through Criolo’s Project Etérea (2019)

Presenter: Gabriel M. Juliano

Simon Fraser University

“Etérea” (2019) is a media arts project conceived by the Brazilian rapper Kleber Cavalcante Gomes, known as Criolo, consisting of a song, music video, and a making-of documentary. In conjunction with a group of performers, the rapper pays homage to Brazilian queer culture while bringing awareness and questioning the prejudice against this marginalized group. Employing critical media art analysis supported by De Sousa Santos’ decolonial theories of knowledge production in the Global South and Eve Tuck’s studies for ethical decolonial research, I investigate “Etérea” (2019) as a decolonial project of LGBTQ+ activism. Criolo is a well-known rapper for his politically charged productions; through the project “Etérea” (2019), the rapper explains imperial social structures of power that still damage the queer community while displaying the artists’ capacity to produce knowledge and represent themselves. In the song’s lyrics, he questions homophobia and uncovers the paradoxical relation of desire and hate but proposes that violence will not prevail. This positioning is supported by the performers’ dance and stories that expound violence but plural representation and beauty. Criolo gives the stage to queer artists in both visual media as he invites performers to dance and speak for themselves. “Etérea” (2019) brings awareness to LGBTQ+ phobia and its violent consequences. This project operates as a political fight against perpetuating colonial hegemonic ideology; when living in Brazil – the country that kills LGBTQ+ people the most – surviving turns into a state of resistance. Even though it exposes violence against a marginalized community, the performers emphasize their bodies’ political significance and existence as decolonial forms of resistance. Ultimately, the project focuses not on the damage. Instead, it reveals the artists as agents of their beings and producers of art practices that generate representation, love, hope, and a sense of community.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s Queer Photographs: Representing a Fetishised Aesthetic

Presenter: Marcus B. Young

University of Calgary

Homoerotic photography has operated to liberate queerness through the camera’s ability to pronounce ideas and experiences that were prohibited within dominant discourse. Photography reproduces affective memories which enable the spectator to share in the narratives embedded within an image. The photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe certainly relay queer experience by means of illustrating sexual fantasy to the public; however, I propose a counter-reading of his images, as I draw on the notion of fetishism, and how homoerotic photography still perpetuate a dangerous fascination towards the Other. I problematise the fetishistic nature of gazing upon the Other within the highly celebrated artworks of Mapplethorpe. In approaching the intersections of visuality, race, gender, and photography, I primarily employ the following authors in informing my analysis: hooks (1992) and Mercer (2013) on visuality and race, Sedgwick (1993) on gender, and Barthes (1980) and Silverman (2015) on photography. What these authors argue is an affective and malleable way of looking at gender identity, especially through the lens of technological expression: photography as storytelling. The present work contributes to existing literature by means of complicating our consumption of art, particularly Mapplethorpe’s work whose images are regarded as icons within queer culture. Understanding this will allow us to differentiate representation from repression, as we reflect on our historic practices of consumption. The current work critically looks at "change" through the lens of photography, and how the camera has operated to represent LGBTQ+ communities, as well as their experiences through artistic expression.

A Visual Rhetorical Analysis of Queer Visibility Strategies Active in Contemporary American Television

Presenter: Madison Daniels

University of Calgary

Research on queer visibility in media has frequently focused on the content of queer representation (Dhaenens & Bauwel, 2012; Manuel, 2009; McCarthy, 2001). This study challenges this approach by analyzing the strategies of how queer visibility is conveyed in contemporary American television dramas. The analysis focuses on scenes with implicit and explicit queer references from the shows Station 19 and Mr. Robot. Through a visual rhetorical analysis of visual and verbal performance of queerness, this study found four major strategies of queer visibility, which will be discussed in my presentation. Firstly, there is a strategy of heterosexual characterization, meaning queerness is permitted if it has heterosexual attributes, one of the queer persons being masculine and the other feminine. Secondly is the Greek strategy, a historical strategy inspired by ancient Greek times when the significant age gap between two men in a queer relationship was acceptable. Thirdly is the semi-explicit strategy, where the expression of queerness in a relationship is mixed between overtones and undertones of queerness. Finally, there is the implicit strategy where queerness between two characters only exists in the undertones, gestures, and words. These findings highlight the repertoire of queer visibility strategies possibly present in other American television shows.