Community-Based Media and Social Change

UPDATE: This program has changed from Winter-Spring to Winter only. The teaching team will be offering a revised Spring Quarter program titled Community Media, Television Production, and Social Change.

In this program, we will explore community-based media as an experiential, embodied practice of social and political action. We will focus on challenging our ways of understanding power, community resilience, inclusion and social transformation, emphasizing relationship-building as the foundation for collaborative media practices with potential for social change. We will focus our work in Shelton (Mason County), Olympia, and beyond. We will engage with issues of immigration, LGBTQ+ resilience, youth, labor, education, food justice, housing, and others, and their impacts within local communities. We will learn skills in qualitative research, media production, and oral history interviewing, and explore their potential uses in community collaboration, seeking to follow the community’s lead to guide our collective work.

We will develop foundational knowledge, skills, and relationships that will set the stage for deepening our work later. We will explore the heterogeneity and diversity of Latinx communities in the US, engage with (im)migrant histories and stories, examine impacts of US policy on migration and the displacement of indigenous peoples from Latin America to the US. We will gain familiarity with local history and with people and organizations who are addressing a range of community issues in transformative ways, engaging specifically with LGBTQ+ histories through collaborative work with Pride Story Archive (Window Seat Media). We will develop skills in critical analysis of media and the power dynamics of representation, at the same time as we reflect on how dominant social structures appear in daily life and how they may be contested or mitigated. We will explore various modes of creation–narratives, zines, sound recording, podcasts, video– and what each offers as a mode of expression. We will begin work on practices relevant for crafting counter-narratives, oral history, and multimodal media production. Our work will be informed by popular education and participatory methods that aim for respectful, ethical, and reciprocal community collaborations.

Most class meetings will take place on campus, though we will meet in community settings increasingly over time. This will include volunteer work with, or accompaniment of, community members or groups.

Anticipated Credit Equivalencies:

4 - Latinx Studies

4 - Community-Based Learning

4 - Fundamentals of Community-Based Media Practices

4 - Media Projects