When Home Leaves You: An Immersive Experience featuring Oral Histories of Climate Change and Migration
An interdisciplinary research framework and multimedia installation exhibited in the Swale House, Governor’s Island (summer 2024) that blends oral history, multimedia art practices and participatory educational frameworks to further understand the lived experiences of those affected most by climate change. As the threat of climate change materializes across the globe, it is reshaping the socio-political dynamics with-in local and global contexts. Within increasingly complex geo-political systems, it is essential to understand how the environment, immigration and social justice intersect. How do we narrate stories that map these relationships? Why is it critical to understand the lived experiences of those who are directly and indirectly affected by climate change? How are people experiencing displacement or adapting their traditional lifestyles to new climate realities? How can we understand and express the intersectionality between climate change, and economic structures? How can we educate and communicate to the public in new and interactive ways?
At Intersection of Media Art, Translanguaging and Trauma Informed Pedagogy: developing Interdisciplinary Pedagogical Methods
With a pilot program scheduled for July 2024, in partnership with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) youth program in NYC, we aim to develop a pedagogical model/modular curriculum that combines the following core tenets: translanguaging, media-making arts and trauma informed peace studies. In an increasingly polarized world, pandemics, climate change and war are affecting the socio-emotional and academic well being of asylum seeking youth in NYC. According to the National Scientific Council on Developing Children at Harvard University, “early exposure to extremely fearful events affects the developing brain, particularly in those areas involved in emotions and learning.” We posit that interdisciplinary pedagogical frameworks that blend inclusive and creative spaces for students to leverage their multiple linguistic and cultural repertoires to engage with and derive meaning from a media-making curriculum that fosters a culture of embodied learning, collaboration, and discussion will enhance resiliency, and feelings of agency in asylum seeking youth. Digital skills, production workshops, community building and participatory approaches will offer language learners opportunities to co-create with each other and interact with the dynamic world around them in a safe and just space.
Oral history project: Gregorio Luperón High School in New York City
In 2021 with the support of Taconic Fellowship Chloe Smolarski (Pratt Institute) and Tasha Darbes (Pace University) launched Community Response / La Comunidad Responde, a participatory media lab pilot program to address the lived experiences of the students of Gregorio Luperón High School, a bilingual STEM school that serves Latinx immigrant youth in NYC. The project blended Critical Media Literacy, Oral History, and Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodologies to investigate creative forms of co-creating knowledge production at the intersection of research and the media arts. Centered on three interrelated themes: historizing lived experience, community empowerment and nurturing creativity – students were trained as oral historians, media makers and artists. As Covid -19 closed the school, effectively causing immigrant students to experience displacement once again, we pivoted and developed a process of participatory oral history to co-investigate and respond to issues of loss, isolation and precarity in and outside their school. Leveraging Bahkhtin’s dialogic narrative framework that places the concept of polyglossia at the core of the novel, the oral history collection functions as an unfinished living history told from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders from the community. Placing knowledge production and creativity at the center of youth empowerment and community agency, students then instrumentalized the themes that surfaced in the oral histories to create short, poetic videos which serve as both artistic forms of expression and data visualizations. https://lacomunidadresponde.co/
Fluid identities and navigating integration: The politics of solidarity in contemporary Germany
Smolarski, C. (2018), ‘Fluid identities and navigating integration: The politics of solidarity in contemporary Germany’, Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, 9:1, pp. 45–59, doi: 10.1386/cjmc.9.1.45_1 – 2018
Due to political, economic and environmental factors, global immigration will only increase. Using Germany as a case study, the research question addressed in this article is not if the public thinks immigrants and asylum seekers should be permitted entrance to politically stable countries, but rather once they have arrived, what active strategies can be implemented to achieve healthy integration and who should set the agenda? A qualitative data analysis, culled from interviews conducted during the summer of 2016, contribute to the debate on public opinion around the politicization of immigration and identity. This analysis examines the media coverage of specific socially and politically charged events in relation to Germany’s solidarity movement, known as Willkommenkultur (welcome culture). The study found that the way in which a society defines, frames and understands the motivations behind its movements of opposition, or solidarity, potentially allows for a shift in perspective leading to a reimagining of what is and what could be.
Admissions Documentary – Student Stories from Undocumented America
https://www.admissionsdocumentary.com/
Admissions is a character driven, feature-length creative nonfiction film exploring the highly personal stories of four undocumented college students: Blanca, Charlie, Viridiana and Jong Min. Trapped at the intersection of education policy and broken immigration systems, the obstacles these students face—financial, legal and psychological—are presented, demonstrating the dehumanizing effects of marginalization and unequal educational access. Poignant narratives—a seventeen-year-old discovering his unauthorized status, an angry young adult being accompanied by her mother to buy fake papers, a college student being expected to train his own boss, and the identity crisis which arises when a student returns to Mexico speaking “like a gringo”—unfold seamlessly, deconstructing the nuances of surviving as an undocumented student in a deeply flawed and politicized educational system. At the intersection of personal narrative, art and education, Admissions delves into the inherent contradictions and psychological implications of being an undocumented student in higher education. Featuring experimental sound design, unsynchronized imagery, and a sophisticated metaphorical language, Admissions creates a space in which new forms of struggle and dialogue emerge. admissionsdocumentary.com