Learning to Cultivate Community Care Through a Collaborative Filmmaking Project

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 3:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Community Connection Across Digital Social Spaces (Table 1)

Abstract

Remedying socio-ecological crises requires collective learning in which humans restory their relations with/in their broader ecologies. I examine how a predominantly white community learns how to cultivate care within a densifying Seattle neighborhood. Residents led a series of walking tours which were recorded and assembled into a documentary film. Using audiovisual recordings from one tour and a film assembly meeting, I draw on feminist scholarship and social semiotics to understand how analog and digital media assemblages enable discourses of care to surface as participants narrate their neighborhood. The filmmaking process provided opportunities for participants to both embody community care and to contest its meaning. This paper offers guidance for education researchers to design similar community-engaged, multimedia storytelling projects.

Author

• Ari Hock, University at Buffalo - SUNY