Community Informatics Multimedia Archive

I just met Mary L. Gray and heard her talk about her new book, Out in the Country (NYU Press, 2009). She spent about three years living in smallish towns in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee, as a participant observer of LGBTQ youth. The subtitle of her book is “Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America.” She told a story of young people driving for over an hour to meet at a regional Wal-Mart, one of the few places open 24 hours, to dress in drag in the store, show off their outfits, photograph each other and then upload the photos, with the final upload culminating the event. The photography and the posting of the photos to the web was key to the ways in which they created space for themselves. While she talked about the negative images of “rural” that folks in less populous places have to work against–from the bumpkin-ness of “The Beverly Hillbillies” to the violence and hatefulness of “Deliverance” to the bleakness of “Brokeback Mountain”–she suggested that for most rural youth the Internet was less of an escape than a place of connection. Further, that the connections on- and off-line had a continuity that helps support a young person’s identity explorations, since there are so few models of “how to be trans” or “what gayness in a small town looks like.” Mary gave me a whole new understanding of the 1972 film by John Boorman, “Deliverance”–a movie I watched once and never cared to think about much after that–and also of Ang Lee’s 2005 movie, “Brokeback Mountain.” Apparently gay youth in small town USA did not find the homophobic violence believable, nor did they accept the opinion of the Heath Ledger character in “Brokeback Mountain” that two men living together just would not work in their towns. She stressed that living in rural America is in marked contrast to that in big cities, but small towns discriminate differently, not necessarily more. Definitely a book to buy and read. Thanks, Mary!

Sharon Irish, CII Project Coordinator, and UI history professor Leslie Reagan are co-teaching a course for first-year students in the Fall of 2009 called “Art Creativity Diversity.” We’ll have about 18 students just starting at the University of Illinois and together we will explore a wide variety of cultural events in Champaign-Urbana. The funding comes from the Mellon Foundation for a three-year pilot curriculum-based arts initiative through the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.  This is the second year of the grant.

Here’s the amazing thing: the funding pays for attendance at concerts, plays, operas, and dance performances at Krannert Center. Free, for the whole semester! We will meet twice a week, but one of those meetings will be an art event of some sort. We’ll do walking tours of campus and community art, museum visits, potluck discussions with working artists, in addition to the Krannert Center trove of offerings. The class will focus on the important issues and values associated with diversity and the creative process in the context of our lives and experiences. Leslie and Sharon hope to invite class members to create some art of their own, so stay tuned!

This past April, Melissa Martinez participated on the Sustaining the Cyberlife of Chicago’s Ethnic Communities Panel for eChicago 2009 Cybernavigating our Cultures at Dominican University. She presented on the archival project that is underway between the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. The goal of this project is to digitally archive materials from the Puerto Rican Cultural Center that have been generated and published by the Puerto Rican Cultural Center and its institutions. The materials selected to be part of this project were transferred to the Special Collections Department at the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago during the early winter months of 2009.

One thousand images will be digitized and made available online to the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School, the Paseo Boricua community, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, researchers and others during this project. Ms. Martinez discussed how the project gave Chicago’s Paseo Boricua community control in creating this digital archival collections and the role this project has in the cyber sustainability of the community during her presentation.

The project can be viewed at the following link:
http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm4/index_uic_prcc.php?CISOROOT=/uic_

The fifth annual Community as Intellectual Space symposium was held June 12-14, 2009, on Division Street in Chicago’s Paseo Boricua neighborhood. The theme of this year’s symposium was “Critical Pedagogy and Community Building.” Co-organized by the Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC) and the Community Informatics Initiative (CII) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the symposium also had significant support from DePaul University, Universidad del Turabo, Northern Illinois University, Pedro Albizu Campos High School, Indiana University, and several other UIUC units. Critical pedagogy is an approach that challenges dominant mainstream practices and beliefs while encouraging students traditionally disenfranchised in the educational system to become critically conscious of their own cultures and histories. The three-day symposium explored how different organizations can come together in solidarity to transform communities through dialogue. This year’s symposium was packed with panels and workshops highlighting the importance and the role of critical pedagogy in the Chicago neighborhood around Paseo Boricua.

Antonia Darder, UIUC professor in the Educational Policy Studies and Latino/a Studies Departments, was the keynote speaker. Darder is a leading scholar in the field of critical pedagogy. Her written works include Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy Of Love and The Critical Pedagogy Reader: Second Edition (co-edited with Marta P. Baltodano and Rodolfo Torres.)  Dr. Darder delivered a thoughtful and emotional speech on the importance of critical pedagogy within educational structures.

Saturday morning highlighted the usage of critical pedagogy at the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School (PACHS) in Chicago. Both students and teachers from PACHS, along with Ida Roldán of the Institute for Clinical Social Work, Troy Harden, faculty member at Chicago State University, John Fritsche, chair of the Department of Education at Illinois College, and Michelle Torrise, a recent graduate of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, presented thoughts on the empowerment of critical consciousness and education.

The afternoon session began with two workshops on “Engaging the Community as a Locus of Knowledge.” These workshops highlighted several ongoing projects between the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago and the CII at the UIUC Graduate School of Library and Information Science, including efforts to catalog the center’s library using LibraryThing. Afterwards, Laura Ruth Johnson and several of her students from Northern Illinois University presented on community-based research practices and experiences on Paseo Boricua. Graduate students in Dr. Johnson’s course worked at a local café and learned about traditional Puerto Rican music, for example. The students on the panel shared what they had learned and how community engagement had transformed their research experience.

Ann Bishop, director of CII, led a panel on community inquiry and informatics with Victor Benitez and Licia Knight. The panelists discussed their experiences working in and with the Paseo Boricua. A Café Teatro Batey Urbano performance entitled “Crime Against Humanity” followed, rounding out Saturday’s events. “Crime Against Humanity” is a play depicting the struggles and joys of several Puerto Rican political prisoners’ lives behind bars. The play is based on interviews with released prisoners.

Artist Pablo Marcano, who was visiting from Gurabo, Puerto Rico, opened Sunday’s events with a video of a recent art project of his in which the homes in a hillside village in Puerto Rico were repainted with Caribbean colors to reflect the town’s heritage. Earlier in the conference, on Friday, Mr. Marcano opened an exhibit of his bold, bright paintings at the Institute of Puerto Rican Art and Culture in Humboldt Park. Mr. Marcano traveled to Urbana-Champaign following the conclusion of the symposium to examine a site where (later this year) he will begin installing a mural.

Sunday’s events also included several panels on critical inquiry and community health; critical engagement; critical literacy; and asset-based community service learning. Howard Rosing, Executive Director of the Community-Based Service Learning Program at DePaul University, and Marisol Morales, Associate Director of the Community-Based Service Learning Program, highlighted how an asset-based community service learning model can produce more collaborative and long-lasting relationships among students, faculty, universities, and communities.

The panels were followed by a short documentary, produced by graduate student Alexandra Cavallaro and Ph.D. student Patrick W. Berry from UIUC. The documentary showed how students from Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School in Chicago used creativity and life experience to learn in an urban environment.

The symposium came to a conclusion mid-Sunday afternoon following a short reflection in which symposium goers were able to share their thoughts and feelings about what they learned and saw over the course of the three days. The symposium brought together about 100 people. While feedback was generally positive, one suggestion for future conferences was representative: set aside time for an “unconference, where the agenda is set by the participants.”

We are in the process of compiling a multimedia archive of the conference, so stay tuned!