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Patty Ahn, Ph.D.

 

“I am proposing to use my media activism course (Comm 101T) to pilot a CESL media production course on community-based storytelling in San Diego. The class would be integrated with a large-scale digital storytelling project I am currently co-developing with faculty from History, Ethnic Studies, and Communication, our digital librarians, and five local organizations (listed below). Together, we are working to build a web-based map and interactive audiovisual database that captures and amplifies the stories of communities who have been displaced and dispossessed by settler colonialism, militarism, and border security in the greater San Diego region, and yet have forged communities of belonging through collective organizing and resistant practices. Our confirmed community partners include: Detainee Allies; Barrio Logan College Institute; East African Cultural and Community Center; the Filipino National Historical Society; and several Native American activists and scholars from a UCHRI multicampus research group called “Critical Mission Studies at California’s Crossroads.”


We are only in the very beginning stages of development but envision substantial student involvement in each of phase and area of the project–from conceptualization, to research and data collection, to creative and technical execution.


For AY2019-2020, my proposed CESL course would partner specifically with Detainee Allies—a group of activists and faculty who collect and deliver personal letters written to and by migrants held in detention centers across San Diego. The group has already redacted, digitized, and archived hundreds of these letters and wishes to work with my students to bring these letters to life both sonically and visually, in hopes of humanizing these detainees’ stories. We are also in the process of conceptualizing how to represent the carceral spaces and conditions detainees must survive through the creative uses of sound and other media forms. Students in my course would also organize, host, and audio-visually document a letter-writing event at UCSD and hopefully build an accessible model for other students to continue to coordinate more events in the future. I organized a similar type of event with students at Occidental and it was wildly successful and emotionally powerful for everyone who participated.


Thus far, we have received a modest UCHRI grant to to support the creation of a prototype. However, the grant only covers the cost to create the site itself and not the production of content, which undoubtedly will be the most time-consuming, cost-intensive, and laborious component of the project.


While we see undergraduate participation figuring most heavily at the level of content creation and curation, we also hope to train and build the technical capacities of our graduate students who can offer more sustained forms of support beyond the scope of the CSEL class.”

Barrio Logan College Institute; East African Cultural and Community Center; the Filipino National Historical Society; and select Native American activists and scholars from the Critical Mission Studies Project.