Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

La Comunidad Responde/ Community Response is a participatory media lab pilot program at the intersection of research and the media arts, which blends Critical Media Literacy, Oral History, and Participatory Action Research (PAR). Latino immigrant students were trained as oral historians, media makers, and artists to co-investigate and creatively respond to issues of loss, isolation and precarity in and outside their school experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the methods of participatory oral history students conducted oral histories with-in their community. Students then used a grounded theory approach to use the themes that emerged in the oral histories to create short, poetic videos which serve as both artistic forms of expression and data visualizations. We focus on two outcomes of this project: (1) the oral history collection, which functions as an unfinished living history told from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders from the community and (2) the curriculum, or iterative process of combining participatory oral history with media art making in order to historize lived experience, nurture the creativity, and develop agency of young people. We discuss the tensions produced by situating the production of creative expression and knowledge generated by research as dialogic partners in a process of inquiry. Examples of student work and curricular activities highlight the productivity of these interdisciplinary practices.