InsUrgent Media from the Front: Past and Present Stories of Media Activism
InsUrgent Media from the Front: Past and Present Stories of Media Activism
Friday, March 5, 7:00 PM EST to 8:30 PM EST
Virtual event on Zoom
This hybrid screening and discussion event brings together activists and scholars to reflect on our present moment of social upheaval and the role mediamaking plays in it. Taking its basis from the recent release of InsUrgent Media From the Front: A Media Activism Reader (Indiana University Press, 2020), the book’s co-editors Chris Robé and Stephen Charbonneau, with contributor Tanya Goldman, will moderate a discussion between event attendees and three activist media makers working today: Scholar-media maker Angela Agauyo will focus on the history of abortion documentary in the United States and how modes of representation and participatory practice collide with a collective emotional habitus that is unyielding and increasingly violent; Chun Chun Ting will discuss the media activist group, V-Artivist, and its ties to urban social movements in Hong Kong; and Dennis Flores will reflect on his decades working with copwatch groups in the United States and Latin America and the work in moving forward.
Together, these activists will share excerpts of their work, fostering a discussion about past and present struggles faced by progressive movements and how activism and activist mediamaking go hand in hand to cultivate networks of solidarity and coalition building between diverse constituencies.
Free and open to the public.
Participant Biographies
Angela J. Aguayo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is a scholar-media maker specializing in participatory and engaged cinema. Her most recent book, Documentary Resistance: Social Change and Participatory Media (Oxford University Press, 2019) investigates the political impact and democratic possibilities of engaged production practice. Aguayo is an award winning writer, director and producer of documentary shorts utilized in community engagement campaigns. Her work has screened at festivals and museums around the world.
Dennis Flores is a multimedia artist, activist and educator based in New York. One of the pioneers of the modern day copwatch movement in New York, Dennis began to organize patrols of everyday people to film and document police misconduct beginning in 1999. He is founder and lead organizer of El Grito, a grassroots community-based organization that advocates for the public’s right to film the police. El Grito organizes Sunset Park Puerto Rican Day Parade, which created a celebration of Puerto Rican culture safe from police harassment. In the mid-1990s, influenced by The Young Lords Party, he and the street organization he belonged to – deemed a gang by law enforcement officials – began organizing around social justice issues. He and others began to organize with families of victims of the police amid the political unrest of the Rudy Giuliani era in New York City. The use of video to not only expose police brutality, but to help exonerate those who were arrested and criminally charged, laid the foundation for the growing police accountability movement seen across the country today. Today, Dennis is a frequent speaker, commentator, and community advocate. You can follow him on Twitter at @dennisflores.
Chun Chun Ting is assistant professor at the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She teaches Chinese literature and cinema, activism and art, youth cultures, and Chinese ecocriticism. Ting is currently working on a manuscript on spatial politics and social movements in postcolonial Hong Kong. She also writes on Chinese documentaries and films, as well as on migrant workers’ literary production in contemporary China.
Chris Robé is a Professor of Film and Media at Florida Atlantic University whose research addresses community media and media activism. His books include Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture and Breaking the Spell: A History of Anarchist Filmmakers, Videotape Guerrillas, and Digital Ninjas. He is also co-editor, with Stephen Charbonneau, on InsUrgent Media from the Front (Indiana University Press, 2020)
Stephen Charbonneau is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and Graduate Director in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University, where he teaches courses in film and digital media. Projecting Race: Documentary Film, Civil Rights, and Postwar America (2016), his first book, traced the evolution of race-based, nontheatrical cinema in the postwar era. With Chris Robé, he recently published the collection, InsUrgent Media from the Front with Indiana University Press (2020).
Tanya Goldman is a PhD candidate at New York University. Her research explores the history of nontheatrical film distribution as a political and cultural tastemaking practice. Her essays on leftist documentary distribution during the 1930s have recently been published in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television and InsUrgent Media from the Front: A Media Activism Reader (2020).