I had to do a little Internet research but it turns out that Fall 2014 was my sixth iteration of Visual Research Methods, taught once a year at CGU since 2010. The course changes as do I, as does the Internet, academia, and the visual. The books I teach have been swapped, versioned, and traded-out as I add new themes: Digital Humanities came in in 2012, Digital Storytelling became the Lambert version a bit after that. The assignments stay the same although their tenor seems linked to each discrete class (see below): a video essay, documentary/ethnographic film, a digital story and academic blog. While I’ve been blogging since 2007, with some review it seems I haven’t blogged about the class every year, although many of the courses are covered (follow links please). But I have continued to learn and share from this class, one that I have always insisted is much more a meta-investigation of academia, the humanities, professionalization, disciplines and their disciplining, academic labor, writing, and the audience and function of our work as it is about learning some “visual methods.” However, the most obvious and lasting change across the past five years are as dynamic as is the Internet, and these come in two parts:
humanities graduate students’ exponential growth in their familiarity with and use of digital media linked to web 2.0’s ever easier affordances (only in the beginning did we need a TA and labs for the course to give both access to equipment and tutorials; that’s all easily available now)
the exponential decline in the strength of the academic labor market, demanding alt-ac considerations for all and thus the use of said methods not just as a thought or meta-experiment but perhaps as a professional necessity
As I consider the course in context of larger shifts in academia, I’d also posit that each year there are more and more kindred efforts being mounted across the humanities (in large part because of the growth of DH, and also perhaps the video essay and/or video) but also because the increasing digitalization of pedagogy, and the academy more generally has made thinking about and with Internet tools a much more common practice than it was only five years ago. This does make me wonder if the course needs a reboot to bring it more squarely into social media becoming something more akin to Miriam Posner’s course on Selfies, Snapchat and Cyberbullies or Adeline Koh’s class on Digital Writing.
Speaking of DH, it turns out I won’t be teaching the class for the next several years, as I helm the Claremont College’s Mellon DH grant and finish out my tenure at Pitzer’s Munroe Center for Social Inquiry. Because of my reduced teaching load, my colleagues and more pointedly administration at Pitzer have asked that the limited classes I offer go to our undergrads, and this only seems fair. It will be interesting to see if the course continues without me; if there is demand; a teacher; momentum.
One final thought. After reviewing the work of this year’s batch (ever a pleasure, every year a gift), I’d have to say that this posse took the class more personally, privately, and creatively than might have been true for previous years. While this reflection occludes those who did produce highly theoretical or political work this year, and those who did deeply personal work in other years, I do wonder if this is a trend that reflects the technological and professional changes I listed above, or rather is some indication of my own inclinations—steering as I do this eclectic bunch each year—my own hand being soft but also firm and ever changing. This year the course, which always has many feminists, queers, and people of color, was almost entirely dominated by students of said persuasions, and that became a powerful set of lenses through which my own pedagogy and the students’ learning and production were processed. Perhaps there was also something very personal here.
I do hope you will take a look at the many links provided in the paragraph above as well as the videos posted here. They take you to each of this years’ students work. And, if you’ve taken the course in any of its many iterations, I’d love this to be an opportunity to hear you reflect on my observations here, this year’s students’ work, or your own experience in the course, given as it also a good-bye of sorts at least for awhile to VRM.
Finally here’s the best blog roll I could compile with the spotty evidence at hand (can’t seem to find S 2010, F 2010). If I don’t have you here, please do let me know (or if you want to be taken off). I’m hoping it’s true that some of you are still blogging, and I’d love to learn that this is a hold-over or take-away from the course even as the Internet (and you) change and grow.
I was recently interviewed by Julia Fernandez for the Library of Congress’ blog: The Signal. It was a pretty cool platform in which to be able to talk abut my problems with YouTube as an “archive” and otherwise. The interview begins like this:
Julia: In the intro to your online video-book “Learning From YouTube” you say “YouTube is the Problem, and YouTube is the solution.” Can you expand on that a bit for us?
Alex: I mean “problem” in two ways. The first is more neutral: YouTube is my project’s problematic, its subject or concern. But I also mean it more critically as well: YouTube’s problems are multiple–as are its advantages–but our culture has focused much more uncritically on how it chooses to sell itself: as a democratic space for user-made production and interaction. The “video-book” understands this as a problem because it’s not exactly true. I discuss how YouTube isn’t democratic in the least; how censorship dominates its logic (as does distraction, the popular and capital).
YouTube is also a problem in relation to the name and goals of the course that the publication was built around (my undergraduate Media Studies course also called “Learning from YouTube” held about, and also on, the site over three semesters, starting in 2007). As far as pedagogy in the digital age is concerned, the course suggests there’s a problem if we do all or most or even a great deal of our learning on corporate-owned platforms that we have been given for free, and this for many reasons that my students and I elaborate, but only one of which I will mention here as it will be most near and dear to your readers’ hearts: it needs a good archivist and a reasonable archiving system if it’s to be of any real use for learners, teachers or scholars. Oh, and also some system to evaluate content.
YouTube is the solution because I hunkered down there, with my students, and used the site to both answer the problem, and name the problems I have enumerated briefly above.
#Ev-ent-anglement #1 will occur here on August 26-August 30.
This #ev-ent-anglement is an experiment (in beta; quite Frankenstinian, really) in a digital and embodied collective, feminist, media praxis: a feminist project of making, sharing, using, and learning in embodied digital spaces. You are invited to participate by #Cutting/Pasting+Bleeding from digital fragments of yourself as you deem relevant to the larger entanglement: your feelings, knowledge, commitments, and questions.
Together we will author an intra-active collection of digital objects (comments/writing, tweets, photos, urls) in conversation with Alexandra Juhasz’s talk (To Perform a Theory of Feminist Digital Praxis) and associated Power Point, and also with each others entangled fragments.
A “How To” script for your participation is provided. It is requested that you participate, at a minimum, twice, during the time of the #ev-ent-anglement:
Use #eventanglement on Twitter and Instagram
Write as you wish in the comment boxes (not just “comments,” please)
The talk and power point will be presented live, to be synchronously and communally entangled with, on August 27, from 9-10:45 (CEST), to a group of approximately 50 graduate students and faculty in Gender and Media Studies at the University of Utrecht who are attending the Noise European Summer School in Women’s Studies from Multicultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. The focus for 2014 is “Political Aesthetics and Feminist Theory: Media, Art and Affect.” You can join the synchronous group on the #ev-ent-anglement, of course, or contribute asynchronously over the four days that it is live on the Internet.
The talk and #ev-ent-anglement are in conversation with imperatives raised in three assigned readings for the seminar:
About “cutting well,” as directed by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska in Life After New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012): Chapter 1 “Mediation and the Vitality of Media” and chapter 3 “Cut! The Imperative of Photographic Mediation.” They also ask: “Can we think of a way of ‘doing media studies’ that is not just a form of ‘media analysis’ and that is simultaneously critical and creative?” Life After New Media – Chs. 1+3.0135c.arc
About Robyn Weigman’s call to “Do Justice With Objects” particularly in Women’s and other disciplines of “Identity” Studies: Object Lessons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 1-90 (this is too long to embed here, email me for PDF)
About my own practices of montage, or cutting, in histories and theories of feminist, queer and AIDS activist media. Alexandra Juhasz “Video Remains, Nostalgia, Technology and Queer Archive Activism,” GLQ 12.2 (2006): 319-328. Video Remains, GLQ
Certainly, reading these essays would allow you to be better prepared to create or find quality fragments to contribute to the #ev-ent-anglement. My performative précis introduces the ideas of the talk in brief, as well.
Last Thursday, I received a group email from two European professors of cinema—Dina Iordanova, Professor of Global Cinema and Creative Cultures, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and Eva Jørholt, Associate Professor of Film Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark—alerting me to the inauguration of their website PALESTINEDOCS: “a web resource on films chronicling the life of Palestinians in and outside the Middle East.”
After looking at their welcome page and the amazing set of documentaries and linked resources made available (as well as who was cc’ed on the email and the authors’ bios, as I did not know either of them personally), I began to think about their digital activity in light of my two recent posts on activism, media, and digital engagements in support of peace. While it was never my intention to say activism is not possible on the Internet, or Facebook more specifically, I was trying to better understand my own discomfort with the changing norms, practices and volume of digital actions, displayed by myself and my “friends,” who seem to be engaging in our “political” action (or action about politics) about the current Israeli/Palestinian conflict, primarily inside the hidden (and sometimes visible) boxes of corporate-owned digital spaces.
WOULD YOU HAVE SEX WITH AN ARAB? Yolande Zauberman (France 2011)
I think that Iordanova and Jørholt’s activity helps us to see where engagement on the Internet can be more productive than what I continue to see as proto-political activities we are mostly engaging in around this and other conflicts this volatile Summer: refining and sharing our own positions within complex Internet communities. (Tellingly, that’s how these two producers found me; I was a signatory on a public protest letter which they saw online and which led them to believe I would be interested in their project, as I proved to be).
PALESTINEDOCS mobilizes the Internet’s not unique but heightened affordances of accessibility, transnationality, and instantaneousness (see their welcome remarks) in ways that seem very well suited for movements for peace. “We hope that it would be an advantage to make use of the ‘click through’ access that we provide to most films, as many are available for viewing directly on the Internet,” explained Iordanova to me in a later email. The project activates and is based in a winning set of media actions that begin with the building of this digital resource, and continue with further actions requested in their email (telling others about it, as I am doing here, online; and writing film commentary for the site to help others to better watch, understand, and teach these complicated and diverse films and the controversial and moving histories they document), all this potentially promoting even more actions (viewing documentaries on a laptop, screenings in groups, teaching, reading more, discussion online and off).
PALESTINEDOCS is a project by (and for) scholars (and students) of cinema, and documentary more specifically. “We wanted to DO something, and as film scholars – not doctors, diplomats or even filmmakers – we thought of the site as a means to make more people aware of what it means to be Palestinian,” explained Jørholt in a later email to me. Many documentary scholars, makers, and viewers (like myself) are interested in understanding (and mobilizing) documentary media’s function as activism (and often questioning whether it is activism…) Jorholt explains what moved her to make this site in light of such questions:
Media and social justice … that’s a vast and complex issue. A brief answer would be that films have the capacity to focus on human beings rather than abstract political disagreements and clear-cut warring camps. They may thus be able to sensitize public opinion – and help bring about social justice – in a much more powerful and nuanced way than news reports on mainstream mass media. Provided that the films are seen, of course …. which is where the site can make a difference. Hopefully …
“Welcome to Hebron,” Terje Carlsson (Sweden 2007)
But I will end, where I often do, exhorting us to link our work in representation to (further) actions in the world (including the Internet and the world of media, to be sure). Yes, watch one of the films alone on your computer, but better yet, watch it in a group and talk about it after; share information about this site and other useful resources; write some analysis and share it with someone who may not agree; make your own documentary; go to a protest or teach-in and share your documentary or one of those here; build your own site holding the documentaries you think might add to a conversation supporting peace (for instance, I’d love to see a similar venture about Jewish voices in the diaspora committed to representing peace, for that’s something near and dear to my heart that I’ve seen too little of!)
AIDS activist video and New Queer Cinema are celebrating, respectively, their twenty-five and twenty year anniversaries, and I am connected, as a media maker and theorist to both traditions. As someone who participated in these earlier instances of feminist/queer media praxis (if not revolution), I first affirm that they were each deeply technological; we were always abetted by media, even if this was not yet digital in nature. And, in the living and doing—just as defines our work today—these “movements” (which were, at the time, something closer to linked moments of making; a movement tends to be found retrospectively), felt (as did the Sixties in its living and doing?) enormously small, fleeting, difficult, complex, impossible to render and realize and utterly wonderful and productive.
In my experience, the making and living of alternative, counter or radical culture, through media praxis, does not feel fully revolutionary in its own time because each act of making is too small, unstable, marginal, and precarious; the dominant culture, and its media praxis, looms large, solid, and powerful. And yet, each of these risky acts makes not just media that lasts for future study (and sometimes consolidation as a movement) but small, beautiful, fleeting instants of potential—”revolutionary-instants”—that we recognize and celebrate mostly in their doing and living, and of course, mourn in their immediate passing (only then, sometimes, to also reify in their later study and consolidation).
And, when I make feminist queer media praxis with others today (like this issue here and this writing in this issue), just as was true in the recent past, my work continues to feel incredibly small, local, marginal, frustrating, incidental and sometimes or even often emancipatory in the instants that are the instances of its more radical, collective, visionary doing and making. Brown continues about times better for feminist revolution:
When poetry becomes political, when politics becomes erotic, when thinking is de-commodified and comes to feel as essential to life as food and shelter, not only do ordinary fields of activity become libidinally charged, but this desublimated condition itself betokens (however illusorily) an emancipated world to come.[5]
I know that there have been moments, and actions, and movements in the past where that feeling of revolution feels closer to hand and body than it can today with both technology and capitalism standing between us and nearly everything that we might want or imagine. But instances of essential, libidinal emancipation can be lived, felt, and practiced in our (digital) world structured as it is ever more deeply by capital, in the sparks of political and intellectual attraction, action, and energy we can read (about) here, in instants of ethical interaction that first built what you read here, and in your potential to produce ethical interactions through your own digital engagement with this material. A revolution; not in the least! But queer feminist media praxis that marks that there are alternatives through our collective, principled making, without doubt.
See what I’m talking about here: essays by Aristea Fotopoulou, Kate O’Riordan, Tully Barnett, Megan Bigelow, Dayna McLeod, Jasmine Rault, T.L. Cowan, Karin Hansson, Rachel Alpha, Johnston Hurst, Olu Jenzen, Irmi Karl, Susana Loza, Lusike Lynete Mukhongo, Darnell Moore, Monica J. Casper, Michelle Moravec, Lindsey O’Connor, Noopur Raval, Roxanne Samer, Jenny Sundén, and Joanna Zylinska.
Please see my conversation with Ted Kerr, Programs Manager at Visual AIDS, recently published at Cineaste. Initially asked to discuss Dallas Buyer’s Club we felt we needed to take a lengthier look at the much broader phenomenon of retrospective looking at AIDS fueled by home movie images of the crisis, often shot by AIDS video activists like myself. In the piece we suggest that “the past, signified by the home movies of AIDS, in particular, has many cultural functions, and just as many cultural formations. We begin with Matthew McConaughey’s butt (where else!), and use it as our entry into a lengthy discussion of Dallas Buyers Club, as well as nearly a score of past and present alternative AIDS videos that also broker in activist made home-movie-like images of a crisis past—Like a Prayer (DIVA TV, 1989), Keep Your Laws Off My Body (Catherine Saalfield, Zoe Leonard, 1990), Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (Mark Rappaport, 1992), Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993), Silverlake Life (Peter Friedman, Tom Joslin, 1993), Video Remains (Alexandra Juhasz, 2005), Sex Positive (Daryl Wein, 2008), How to Survive a Plague (2012), Heart Breaks Open (William Maria Rain, 2011), Liberaceón (Chris Vargas, 2011), Sex in an Epidemic (Jean Carlomusto, 2011), We Were Here (David Weissman, 2011), When Did you Figure Out You had AIDS (Vincent Chevalier, 2011), United in Anger (Jim Hubbard, 2012), Untitled (Jim Hodges, Carlos Marques da Cruz, Encke King, 2012), Bumming Cigarettes (Tiona McClodden, 2012), he said (Irwin Swirnoff, 2013), and the poster campaign Your Nostalgia is Killing Me (Vincent Chevalier with Ian Bradley-Perrin, 2013). With Philomena (Stephen Frears, 2013), we return our conversation to more conventional fare before concluding our thoughts upon so many home video returns.”
“Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me” (2013), a poster designed for posterVIRUS by Vincent Chevalier and Ian Bradley-Perrin
My Visual Research Methods course has ended, and as ever, my grad students in a range of programs at CGU have done inspiring and inventive work to wrap up this class which pushes traditional Humanities grad students to roll up their sleeves, work with their hands, imagine new audiences and formats, and think about academic labor and standards using new rubrics.
This year, our assigned readings—in Nick Mirzoeff’s Visual Culture Reader, the Debates in the Digital Humanities Reader, and twobooks about the ongoing and ever-widening Center for Digital Storytelling’s project—linked as they were to an ever more frightening and quickly shifting job market for graduate students, seemed to have helped push this batch of students to do some remarkably innovative digital scholarship, for their final work, thinking about the role of digital storytelling as both a subject and method for scholarly output.
I hope you’ll take a peek at these compelling projects:
A “nod to Lambert, but in a very deliberate style that was anti-Lambert (no voice-over, no clean or clearly announced thesis) … also an attempt to have this video be a moment of reflection, a meditation of sorts on friendship,” AIDS, place, and memory (from a PhD student in religion)
a digital story, made collaboratively with the maker’s high school students to create an “affective space” much like that previously “carved out through the epistle allowing women, a group previously written out of agency to write/right wrongs through new narratives in much the same way that digital storytelling empowers its creator. Telling my story, working delicately against and with the grain of rhetorical confines and the explosively complex element of my students’ personhoods demanded the kind of suturing of disparate intentions so pleasurable to read in the 18thC epistolary novels” (from a PhD student in English, also a High School English teacher)
A video focused upon building “community around and for people dealing with mental illness, who are working to cope with their symptoms in the midst of the exceptional stress of grad school life. My hope is to create a digital story telling circle that will do just that.” (from a Master’s student in Cultural Studies)
A digital story using “a personal narrative of my memories of my aunt’s illness and how I experienced the confusion of coming to terms with her diagnosis as HIV positive. I believe personal narratives such as this are missing from outreach efforts that have aimed to target the Black community in order to bring awareness of the high rates within the community.” (by a Master’s student in Applied Women’s Studies)
This blog post will serve as part of a brief introduction to my current interests as teacher, professor, artist and activist. It will be presented live, on October 10, 2013, to about fifty senior Media Studies majors at the Claremont Colleges. I begin with this video, one I’ve repurposed from a longer talk I gave at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo last spring, about the same three projects: Learning from YouTube, Feminist Online Spaces, and FemTechNet’s DOCC 2013 (all of which are projects that use teaching as a place for my research, community building, activism, and critical internventions into Internet culture.)
The two points I’d like to add here are:
1) I use this video again not because I am lazy or overtaxed, although at least one of these is true, but because it establishes, in form, many of the linked possibilities and obstacles of networked knowledge production in media studies:
its recursive nature
its permanence and temporariness
its ease of production and dissemination
its related contextual and de-contextual affordances, which is to say
2) Why do we do continue to do things in person, when everything I have to say about my work, I’ve already done online (perhaps with more clarity, or brevity, or perhaps with greater detail and more depth)
how do we theorize and make media in a time of overabundance and in a place that is here, there, and everwhere?
No way out, I’m afraid. Blog my thoughts about, Room 237, the obsessive, fun, cringe-inducing (at least for cineastes like me), self-reflexive film about films and their critics (fans? bloggers?) and thereby I’m caught in the very same maze too (and caught there with you, dear reader, writer, blogger, critic, professor?)
So much synchronicity you might say (as would all of the intrepid interviewees in Room 237) given that I was just this very morning talking to my daughter (while I was streaming the film … hmmm), who’s so fired up by her High School English class and English teacher. Although they’re stuck on sonnets, it’s no matter the form, she explains, if your teacher opens you up to formalism. “Did you learn that in college, too, Mommy?” Learn it in college! I teach it to this day: that the formal choices and structures of the artist are there to be read, and interpreted, and thought about and discussed, and even written about by an artist’s devoted, lively readers! “Sure it’s fun to read for plot,” I said to her, “but when your thought processes also get to work through, chew on, revel in the clever devices and lush symbols that hold that story itself, the pleasures multiply.” She agreed. What’s cool about my job, I then explained, is that I get paid to do that: read myself, live myself, be myself, in relation to great works by amazing artists that speak to me (that I speak to). Then I read what others say about that great artist. And even better yet, “I go to a classroom and speak about all this with smart kids, just a little older than you.” (You are getting the symbolism? mother/daughter … almost like twins, or palimsests … like in The Shining, or Room 237 where we actually get to watch what happens when you layer The Shining forward and backward upon itself as a visual reckoning of its conjectured formal mirrorings, repeatings, forward-and-backwarding motifs).
My dear friends, P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes are Executive Producers of Room 237 (Rodney Ascher), and also play their own twinned parts in this tight, intense project that opens creepy, wonderful doors that should allow not just for ruminations on Kubrick—his intentions, his genius, his symbols—but for all of us (writing about movies on the Internet) to reflect upon our own creepy, wonderful critical projects about others’ art, thereby begging the same scary kinds of mirroring questions grappled with in and through Room 237, questions about when something good becomes its evil reverse: artist/critic, fan/art work, mother/house, obsessive-compulsive/close-reader, father/horror, conspiracy theorist/professor, lover/killer. 237‘s team, who themselves lovingly find and know every film reference (and more!) to perfectly illustrate their obsessed subjects’ visions of Kubrick are only different, I suppose, because, well, they made their own successful movie about and from it.
At the DML Open Learning Conference yesterday (synchronicity? conspiracy? fun-house mirror? you tell me!), I was talking with a gaggle of Internet scholars about how to transform the seas of fan culture online (be it remixing, shipping, fanfic) into that very same doorway—the gateway drug to blogging, art-making, criticism, professordum, and yes, sometimes redrum. Is there a difference in kind between my musings about a film or filmmaker (here, or in a book, or a classroom) and that of my daughter and her friends about Homestuck or Supernatural? Or is this only marked by degrees, pedigree, audience, form, format or training? And what are the conditions that reign some of us back: keeping us from devolving into conspiracy theorists or stalkers, our obsession producing an inward maze where at the end all we see are our own creepy visions?
One of the film’s interviewees marks how Kubrick always gives some of his characters the skills to backtrack out of the ever-tightening loop; how he marks special doors that allow for escape out of his tightly-made forms (and the very “formalism” that draws us all into that shared reader/writer, child/maze project that is so deeply compelling). I, too, think that ultimately our forms (that we look at or speak through) are of less importance than are these exits (and to theorize, make, and practice exiting is perhaps even harder than to write the paths deep into the maze). The exit project maps the ways out to spaces for community, builds pathways to conversation and growing understanding, and takes time for these interactions (in class, online, via art) leading to the making of new forms of creativity that allow for other steps forward (while always looking back, to history, to art work, to each other), so as to together understand that the original form must be linked to and left by ourselves as sametime critics and producers of a culture that can sustain us.
I begin my talk with this video about repurposing social media spaces, such as this one, for the specific purposes of multi-disciplinary and multi-modal teaching and learning, as well as for its scholarship by showing this video, so representing, in form, my feminist commitment to engage in self-reflexive, situated critiques of the Internet that model here the kind of culture I hope it to be, a place that enacts collaboration, connections between the classroom and the world, intentional and ethical links between and within real and virtual experiences and private and public knowledge, and a commitment to finding, teaching, and using the forms of literacy best suited for these places and practices.
I self-reflexively argue above, here, and in the talk: engaged, situated pedagogy and research in the digital humanities demand new writing and speaking forms, as well as the presentational and publishing platforms to hold them.
MEDIA PRAXIS 