Back in January we blogged about a competition for documentaries focusing on the multicultural city.  Right now the same organisation is calling for papers for a second festival.  One film I recently came across would certainly fit this framework.  Called, “Hear Every voice: NYC and the National Park Service”, this film is a collaborative effort between filmmaker Stephen Ogumah, the National Parks Service, and sociologists Professors Jerry Krase and Jennifer Adams of Brooklyn College, along with a number of their students.  The central question the film asks is how New York’s national parks can contribute to the experience of urban living, especially for the city’s highly diverse migrant population.

The film brings together the themes migration, multiculturalism, and the uses of urban space, particularly common space.  For example, it considers how shared spaces may be implicated in generating interactions in an ethnically diverse population through practices such as shared gardening, festivals such as carnivals, or even cricket.  Social research methodologies are also featured, as Brooklyn College students work as interns with the National Parks association to research knowledge of, and attitudes towards national parks in NYC.  Overall I found this interesting to watch, mainly because it brought together a themes that I wouldn’t normally associate with each other, namely the possible relationship(s) between migration and national parks.  It’s well worth a watch, and could possibly be a good resource in teaching courses on urban anthropology and/or migration.

more about “Hear Every Voice: NYC and the Nationa…“, posted with vodpod

Posted in Education, Film, Media, Migration, Multiculturalism, Urban Anthropology Tagged: National parks, New York City ]]> http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/nyc-national-parks-migration-and-visual-sociology/feed/ 0 Jovan http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/first-australian-arab-film-festival/ http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/first-australian-arab-film-festival/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 05:49:02 +0000 Jovan Maud http://culturematters.wordpress.com/?p=965 ]]>

I have just received some information about the first national tour of the Arab Film Festival in Australia.  The Festival opens with the Egyptian film, Eye of the Sun, at Dendy Opera Quays Sydney on 1 November.  The Festival contains a program of six films and will tour around Australian cities between 1-29 November.  For more details see the official website http://arabfilmfestival.com.au/

Recently, I read Tom Boellstroff’s book: “Coming of age in second life. An anthropologist explores the virtually human”. The book is an account of two years field work and an anthropological ethnography of avatar life in Second Life. Avatars are virtual personages created and Tom’s avatar was the anthropologist in 2^nd Life, interviewing, observing and, first and foremost, participating in social life.  This resulted in ‘thick description’, useful to understanding social life at Second Life. Tom explained that although it was difficult to tell whether the avatar you were talking to was a man or woman, different persons or human at all, social interaction between avatars in 2^nd Life was ‘real’. Dmitri Williams of the Annenberg school for Communication studied all server logs of 3-D game EverQuest and concluded that gamers are behaving online. Players who live 10 kilometres of each other play five times more intensively than people who live at larger distances (van Ammelrooy, Volkskrant 28 februari 2009).

Increasingly, 3-dimensional virtual platforms are being used by public and private corporations. The VU University, the one I’m working with, has (actually it was dr. Frans Feldberg) build a virtual University in which students can visit different information settings and view teaching examples. Large companies such as the ABN Amro Bank have built digital offices to attract young customers and to try out virtual services. Virtual platforms such as 2^nd Life are designed for social interaction and collaboration. Therefore, it was not strange that practitioners of private construction firms we worked with to reflect upon their practices of collaboration in with public partners suggested to use 2^nd Life. Not knowing much of the platform I started reading about the platform and made myself an avatar. Soon I found myself (my avatar) flying around, talking (typing) with an Italian girl (or someone saying so) about getting around. I tried to drive (sit in it) a parked car, but someone (never seen the avatar) threw me out telling me that I was stealing his car!

In order to facilitate learning of public and private partners we built a simulation game on 2^nd Life centred on a megaproject, the tunnelling of train, road and tram infrastructure in Amsterdam’s corporate suburb Zuid-As. One group played the public office, three others played private construction firms trying out a competitive alliancing tender model. In this model, partners have to collaborate in order to get the best solution for a complex problem, without knowing yet who will get the assignment. Employees (better: avatars) were first trained how to behave themselves at our research island. We had bought the island to have a selected group of people in the project. However, at one stage of the game we had thought of opening up the island for a broad audience to let them make a pubic choice of what the best design would be. This has not been applied yet.

We made a short documentary on the topic and I thought most of the young organisation anthropology students would love this stuff, but to my surprise the reactions were not very enthusiastic. They thought that studying people did not include studying avatars. There were not much anthropologists that would like to be virtual anthropologists, which is a pity. 2^nd Life will maybe disappear but, seeing my daughter using the Nintendo DS to play with her friends, 3-virtual platforms will be helpful in the near future for training and education. And Sony, the ‘owner’ of the earlier mentioned EverQuest was very interested to work with researchers/consultants that could help them understanding their gamers’ behaviour (van Ammelrooy, Volkskrant 28 februari 2009). Is here a new field for applied anthropology?

The Student Equity, Excellence and Diversity Initiative (SEED) at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa has just put out a call for video and photo presentations on the theme of the ‘multicultural city’.  Sounds like an exciting venture.  Here are the details:

Diversity in Place: Making Documentaries on the Multicultural City April 24th, 2009
http://diversityinplace.wordpress.com/

More than half of the population in the world now lives in cities, and the urban share of the globe will continue to increase dramatically to reach 70 percent by 2050. Migration, both from within and among societies, is a major source of urbanization, with multicultural cities on the rise everywhere.

Call for Documentary Film/Video Entries

In an innovative way toward mutual learning, we invite the submission of video and photo documentaries whose emphasis is on exploring multicultural cities and processes of place-making. Scholars, teachers, students and practitioners alike are searching for alternative methods to conventional data analysis and academic writing to be able to capture ethnic diversity and multicultural interactions in real world settings. The use of documentaries to show the daily practices of multiculturalism in the city can make several key contributions to research, teaching and action.

Videos not in excess of 15 minutes are requested for submission to screenings which will be held at the conference venue at the University of Hawai’i Manoa Campus on April 24th, 2009. Selections of videos to be included in the seminar will be made by a committee of students and faculty who are organizing the event. Artists, video- and filmmakers, researchers, writers and others interested in the relation between people and places and the making of multicultural cities are invited to join the project, participate to the seminar to discuss their ideas and work.

Questions, themes, topics and issues to be addressed in the documentaries can include, but are not limited to:

* How documentaries by recoding the presence of people of different origins over time can reveal ‘invisible’ minority cultures in a way that no other media can.
* The efforts at historic preservation of elements of the city that might otherwise have been overlooked but are of high cultural value to members of a community.
* How multiculturalism can work well in practice and thus contribute to a more positive attitude about and pride in the multicultural city, and thereby assist in fostering mutual accommodation and tolerance.
* In an age of global migration in which significant segments of multicultural cities do not have citizenship or are otherwise marginalized in the city, how documentaries can help identify issues of social justice.
* How multiculturalism inscribes itself into the city by everyday uses of urban space and lead us to a greater appreciation of the many different identities that make up the multicultural Cosmopolis of contemporary times.

By combining the reflections and findings emerging around the objectives of the conference, and understanding the inevitability of increasing diversity in urban places, this conference aims at drawing lessons and recommendations as to what makes the creation of ethnic spaces possible, and further what helps to form and shape livable cities with healthy intercultural relations, namely, cities as multicultural places where migrants’ place-making is understood and acknowledged as an inherent human right to the city.

This conference is sponsored by the Student Equity, Excellence and Diversity Initiative (SEED), University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Submission Deadline and Guidelines

The purpose of the call is a selection of a maximum of eight documentaries to be screened in a one-day conference on April 24th, 2009 at the University of Hawai’i.

Submission deadline: March 1st, 2009

Guidelines

Videos should be short — no longer than 15.00 minutes. International and Domestic submissions are encouraged.
The formats accepted are: DVD
Please include: Synopsis, Bio, CV and Contact Information. All submissions will be added to the Diversity in Place Video Library for possible inclusion in future projects. If included in other projects, artists will be contacted for permission.

Send submissions to:

Vera Zambonelli, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Saunders Hall, 2424 Maile Way, 96822 Honolulu HI

Travel and lodging aid:
Pending application, the Project will cover part of travel expenses and lodging in a Youth Hostel for participants residing outside of Honolulu. If traveling to Honolulu is not an option, we will arrange videoconferencing through skype.

For more information: diversityinplace@gmail.com
http://diversityinplace.wordpress.com/

Well, after something of a hiatus I intend to get more active with the posting from now on.

First of all, here is an announcement I just noticed on the Intersections blog about an online video competition with the theme “Intercultural Dialogue”.  Perhaps there are some young visual anthropologists who would like to put in an entry.

Xenoclipse, the group hosting the competition, can be accessed here.

Jovan Maud

The new version of the Firefox web browser was released yesterday with much fanfare in circles that get excited about web browsers. The Mozilla folk were attempting to crack a Guinness Book record for the most downloads in one day, and they appear to have been successful with reportedly more than 8 million copies of the program downloaded in the first 24 hours (as I write the figure is in excess of 10 million).

Okay, but what does this have to do with anthropology?

What prompted me to write this post is the interactive map of global downloads Mozilla posted on their website here.  Although this is not Mozilla’s intention, this provides a graphic example of the discrepancies between access to IT globally.  Most striking are the grey areas with low downloads which cover most of Africa. Note that the figures are raw numbers of downloads rather than per capita figures, so this skews the impression somewhat.  For example, China seems to be right up there with best of them but the figure of 160 odd thousand downloads about the same as Australia, with only about 2% of the population.

The most intriguing detail for me though is the large number of downloads in Iran, the USA’s current enemy number 1; more than downloads in Australia, China, Russia, Canada, Italy or Brazil.  (The map is always evolving, so these facts are only true at the moment of writing.)  What is going on there?  What is the source of this enormous Iranian interest in the premier open source web browser?  Is there widespread hatred of Internet Explorer and Microsoft?  Or does Firefox simply provide excellent Farsi support?  Are similar factors regarding the take-up of technology at work to the ones Greg pointed out in a recent post, and would targetted ethnographic work help to shed some light on this ‘anomaly’?

At the World Editors Forum in Goteborg, Sweden, today AP presented a paper produced by Baltimore-based Context-Based Research Group who conducted a research study around the world into how young people read news.

The report is available from:

http://www.ap.org/newmodel.pdf

This document provides an interesting example of how corporate ethnography is presented to businesses. Short bite sized recommendations grounded in research. The report tries to address the complexity of real world situations. It’s causing quite a stir around my workplace.

A good read for those who are considering venturing into the world of corporate ethnography.

The interesting part for me lies in the forward of the report, it reads:

“An analyst on the planning staff suggested doing an “ethnography” of young adult consumers and after a quick Google search to understand exactly what that meant, we decided to give it a try.

To be frank, our expectations were modest. We sought some real people to put a human face on the accelerating shift to online and mobile consumption of news around the world. We knew young people were at the leading edge of that movement and a cultural science study of their media habits sounded like fun.

In the end, it proved to be as transformative as it was fun. The human stories were only the start. From there, the professional anthropologists we commissioned to conduct the research created a model for news delivery that distilled the challenge to its essential elements.”

Fun and transformative, that’s a start I guess.

Seeing as we have been talking about Burma and the cyclone, biofuels, and the role of anthropologists as public intellectuals, here is a short news piece from the ABC by Monique Skidmore, anthropologist at the ANU, which combines all three.

An Australian anthropologist says the push to grow biofuels has worsened the plight of Burmese cyclone victims.

Professor Monique Skidmore from the Australian National University says The Burmese junta this year has ordered farmers to replace rice with a bitter biodiesel plant called jatropha.

She says the rice supplies are shrinking because of the biodiesel campaign.

“It’s quite incredible to see this arid region plant being cultivated all over the country now, even in the delta area,” she says.

“So people have had to rip up paddy in some places to plant hundreds and hundreds of acres of jatropha and this is a plant that doesn’t grow well, and people do not have the production and distribution facilities to do anything with the product once they get it, and they don’t get much. And of course they’re not being able to cultivate rice in the meantime.

“So it’s an incredibly ridiculous path to embark upon.”

Here’s another example of Skidmore’s public engagement, an audio piece on the psychology of resistance in Burma.

I was delighted to discover today that the American Anthropology Association is broadcasting biweekly podcasts.  The second one reports on a letter that the AAA sent to the Thai government expressing concern about their newly relaunched “war on drugs” and extrajudicial executions during their previous drug war; a response to Stanton’s article entitled “Anthropologists agree on traditional marriage” for Focus on the Family; news on the AAA’s plans to revise the AAA Code of Ethics following the unanimous vote to accept all recommendations in the Ad Hoc Commission’s final report on the engagement of anthropology with US and security intelligence communities; and some stuff on the proposed US fiscal budget that frankly was gobbledygook to me, but anthro policy wonks will probably get it.

In other anthro community news, oh how I laughed at Savage Minds‘ April Fools Day joke.

–L.L. Wynn

More on the U.S. presidential race and tenuous links with anthropology: Michael Silverstein, a professor of anthropology, linguistics and psychology at the University of Chicago, was asked to weigh in on “pimp-gate,” the scandal where MSNBC anchor David Shuster was suspended after suggesting on-air that the Hillary Clinton campaign was “pimping out” Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea.

Here’s the quote I loved:  “To say that someone is pimping is really an extraordinarily negative description,” said University of Chicago’s Silverstein. “It takes a lot of work to use it so ironically that it becomes positive.”