The UFVA 2020 conference went all online this year, and the event featured a diverse array of speakers and events. I was honored to be asked to present a forum on online teaching of group/collaborative work. The audience was lively with a great conversation going in the chat and lots of questions. My slideshow from the session is posted below.

This year at the SCMS conference, I will be participating in the workshop on Saturday, March 17,  “In the Mix: The Collaborative Video Essay in Theory and Praxis,” with Christina Lane, Daniel Clarkson Fisher, Liz Cambron, Nina Bradley, and Nicole Richter.  Our workshop will share our remixes over the last couple of months of a shared pool of clips dealing with the issue of “Post-Truth.”   We are doing a couple of rounds, remixing from the collaborative pool of clips and then remixing our team’s remixed videos.  Here’s a sample of some from our first round:

Christina Lane’s “Post-Truth”

Post-truth 3_02_Lane from Christina Lane on Vimeo.

Daniel Clarkson Fisher’s “The Twilight Zone”

The Outer Limits (SCMS Round 1) from Daniel Clarkson Fisher on Vimeo.

and my remix, “Willkommnen”

Willkommen from DJ Zoe Trop on Vimeo.

For more remixes and info about the workshop, see here: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/scms_2018/index

Virginia Kuhn and I have co-edited a special issue of the journal, The Ciné-Files,  “The Video Essay: Cinematic Writing” (#11).  The issue began as part of an ongoing conversation on digital scholarship with faculty and students at UCC during my Fulbright stay in Cork, Ireland and then grew into an international collaboration of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.  Many thanks to all the collaborators and to Tracy Cox-Stanton for this opportunity to share this dialogue and experimentation in cinematic writing. 

In the last post, I added Laura Serna and my provocation for the SCMS event on Slow Scholarship. Like last year’s epic collaborative event on Participatory Pedagogy, we put up a site this year for Slow Scholarship

Finally, I am getting a chance to post from the workshop at SCMS this year, Participatory Pedagogy.  It was a partnership between the Women’s Caucus (I Co-Chair with Christina Lane, Alyx Vesey is our Grad Rep), the Media Literacy SIG, the Queer Caucus, and the Women and Silent Screen SIG.  This effort in collaborative pedagogy was designed as a hybrid panel/workshop/networking session that invited participants to crowdsource strategies, tools, and resources for film and media courses that integrate media, technology, praxis, and/or activism.   For more on the workshop, please see the website our group put together, including video provocations for the event and names and bios of participants, here.

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October has been a bit crazy.    I am just back from UK (see blog post below) but on October 12, I was part of an event from the always inspiring and newly reborn DIY DAYS, now LEARN DO SHARE, organized by Lance Weiler and The Hub, Civic Innovation Lab.   Below is a photo taken during the presentation by BUKE, the Youth Design team working on designing a bike future for LA.

I presented with my colleague at USC, Michael Bodie, who has been developing the concept of an immersive social change space, which he has called: the 360° docu-narrative.  

Since Bodie and I both work in reconfigurations and experimentations in the area of  non-fictional narratives, we thought it might be interesting to do a workshop on this topic.  We had some great participants in the session, who brought a lot of energy to the event and some great ideas for how they would design their own 360º docu-narrative around the issue of South Los Angeles Gentrification.  The groups only had 20 minutes but came up with some great ideas on how to foster dialogue and connection across diverse community interests.   At the very end of this post you will find our slideshare presentation for the event.