Finding Intellectual Communion in Rural Utah: Adolescent Filmmakers Forging Connection Through Humor and Care

• In Event: Adolescents’ Intellectual and Emotional Communion: Exploring Shared Vulnerability and Connection in Literacy Learning

Abstract

In remembering his friendship with Gene Siskel, film critic Roger Ebert wrote, “We almost always thought the same things were funny. That may be the best sign of intellectual communion.” This paper explores three adolescent girls in a filmmaking workshop in rural Utah developing a sense of intellectual communion through their discovery of a sometimes crass, often absurd sense of humor alongside their efforts to compose three short films during the weeklong camp.

Nellie, Lulu, and Fiona forged caring bonds around and through their humorous media compositions. This work gives attention to the interplay of humor, vulnerability, and empathy within a composing collaborative, and seeks to understand how educators and youth sustained a space that supported authentic youth voice as well as an affective atmosphere that made space for goofiness.

This paper comes from a multi-year collaboration between myself and Spy Hop, a youth media arts organization in Salt Lake City, Utah. Spy Hop embarked on a project called “Voices of the West,” in which media arts educators conducted filmmaking camps in five rural communities across the state. The five communities were selected based on their proximity to Indigenous communities as well as their geographic distribution.

The data from this paper comes from a one-week workshop in year 3 of the project in Blanding, Utah, a town of 3500 people. This was my second visit to Blanding. During both years, I drove from Salt Lake City to Blanding with Spy Hop educators, lived with the educators for the week, and attended all planning sessions. I attended each day of the 9 am to 3 pm camp, taking on a participant observer (Spradley, 2016) role, recording audio and video on multiple devices and taking ethnographic field notes. I conducted formal interviews with all youth participants and educators, as well as multiple informal interviews across the week.

Using “glimmers” (Garcia et al., 2019) as an analytic tool, I read through and across the data to note moments of intimacy and delight, which I identified as glimmers due to their “ephemeral, visceral” (Garcia et al., 2019, p 338) nature. I worked to understand how those glimmers were entangled with the places, practices, and histories in which these girls participated. These glimmers were evident as the collaborators worked on their genre pastiche of a telenovela depicting a lactose intolerant woman writing a dramatic break-up letter with dairy, and their sketch about the 2007 film Bee Movie, in which they explore that film’s unaddressed complications of a romance between a male bee and a human woman.

This study recognizes the humorous composition tasks set before these young people as fertile ground for connection, encouraging participants to negotiate empathy, offer feedback, and encourage authenticity through silliness. This study also recognizes the agentive vulnerability of the three young composers, who were willing to make jokes and propose ideas that led all three, separately, to reflect that they never before knew anyone in their town who shared their sense of humor.

Author

• Virginia Killian Lund, University of Rhode Island