The Social (re)Construction of Scale in Video Documentaries on Immigration

• In Event: 31.090 - Productions of Time-Space in Literacy Studies: Scale, Movement, and Texts

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose: In this study, we explore how a multimedia journalism curriculum implemented in a high school with students from immigrant backgrounds provided a context in which diverse representational resources come into both productive and conflictual relationships with each other. Specifically, we examine how producing a short-form video documentary on immigration allows the students to bring the voices from their community in dialogue with voices from civic institutions and political discourses on immigration, and in the process, construct potentially new understanding of the relationship between these socially stratified spaces.
Theoretical Framework: Coming from social geography, the concept of scale is a way of conceptualizing space as composed of stratified and layered units, and how power in society is exercised through the making and remaking of boundaries among places and sites of social practice (Herod & Wright, 2002; Smith, 2004). Recent work in sociolinguistics has extended this geographical concept to describe how people’s uses of language are “scaled” – i.e. how they index or respond to values, discourses, and practices at various geographical scopes and institutional spaces (Blommaert, 2010; Collins, 2012). In our work, we approach the concept of scale as a socially constructed category and as a category of practice that social and political actors mobilize to create particular understandings of the relationships between spaces (McKinnon, 2013; Moore, 2008). Hence, in examining the social documentaries produced by students, we are interested in how the types of discourses and voices characterizing different spaces are mobilized in potentially new configurations to (re)construct the relationships between these spaces, i.e. to create a particular epistemology of these spaces.

Methods/Data: Our larger data set includes video recording of the multimedia journalism class; documentation of the videos and other artifacts produced by students; and interviews with the students to reflect on the story they were telling and the representational choices that they made. In addition, we interviewed two practicing media producers to understand the representational tools that they use in producing social issue documentaries.
Findings: In analyzing student work, we examine the ways in which the semiotic layering of sound, text, and cinematography serve as important resources in representing the voices of their characters as well as creating dialogic overlays between the points of view of their characters and representatives of civic and political institutions on immigration policy. By connecting characters’ voices and institutional voices that are located in different spaces, documentaries bring these voices in dialogue with each other and redraw the boundaries between these spaces, sometimes by exposing and challenging the working of power between these spaces. This process involves complex literacy skills of using multiple modalities to represent particular points of view, and shifting across languages and registers that are associated with these different viewpoints.
Significance: This study provides suggestions for how media production may offer opportunities for learning that leverage a diverse range of semiotic resources to reconstruct relationships across institutional boundaries.

Authors

• Wan Shun Eva Lam, Northwestern University

• Amy A. Chang, Northwestern University

• Natalia Smirnov, Northwestern University

• Enid Marie Rosario-Ramos, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor