Omnipresence

Omnipresence is one of the latest videos made by students of mine during the fall 2007 semester at the University of Texas at Arlington. This was one of the first films made by students of mine since my move to a new university post.

This video was made as a project for my Jesus in Contemporary Literature and Film course.

You might be able to see that the video and sound aren't as advanced as some of the earlier videos made at Auburn. UT Arlington did not have any facilities for students to check out and use cameras and other film and video equipment until the Spring semester of 2008, so my filmmakers had to improvise in order to complete their projects. Omnipresence was shot with a digital photo camera that happened to also take good quality MPEG video (sorry, I don't know the exact make of the camera). Brian Shef and Katherine Kimball were able to make this video without hardware support from the university and minimal software support, as well. Still, I think their project came out extremely well and represents the best video made for the course at my new institution. I am very proud of what they have done here.

Even though the facilities for student-made videos were underdeveloped at my arrival, I owe a big thanks to Caroline Guertin and the eCreate Lab that she is continuing to develop as a site for technological resources in the English Department. My students are now able to produce much higher quality video productions as semester projects.

Again, I would like to thank Brian Shef and Katherine Kimball for their effort and ingenuity in producing this video. As always, you may also download a copy of the video from the Internet Archive.

Enjoy!

Introducing the First Video Postings from the 1001 Lights Project

This is the video that kicked off this project.

Only in Madagascar was one of many multimedia projects produced by students in my freshman composition course in Spring of 2006. While most of my students chose to do Power Point presentations or posters, this group decided to produce a video dealing with the issue of wildlife conservation in postcolonial Madagascar.

The concept of the composition course was for students to learn and write about various topics dealing with the continent of Africa and its many nations since 1960. Students wrote papers on postcolonial Africa throughout the semester dealing with topics as diverse as AIDS to Sports to African literature and art. The final project was the Multimedia Presentation assignment that allowed students to pull together their knowledge of the continent and produce a presentation designed to teach people in America something otherwise ignored or unknown about one of the countries in Africa. Only in Madagascar was produced by Anna Lee Alford, Jeanne Brackin, Ben Brown, and Alison Faust.




Project Reaction is one of the newest documentary videos produced by students in my Literature of the Black Power Movement course in Spring of 2007. The brainchild of Scott Odom and Austin Gordon, this video broke all of the rules, but ended up being one of my favorites. Part interview format, part drama, this video documents the ways in which race is represented in mainstream media and the effects it has on the lives of people of all ethnicities living in America.

Most of the live interviews were recorded in Opelika, Alabama, a small town just adjacent to Auburn, Alabama where the university of the same name is located. During the production of this video, Austin and Scott would remark to me how difficult it was to get people in the town to open up and actually agree to talk about race and racial issues. The topic was taboo, it seemed. However, they did manage to get good footage in both Opelika and Auburn from people brave enough to speak their minds on the topic. The video is a thoughtful and artfully done critique of the problems of language and hegemony when it comes to talking about race.




What is Terrorism? is another excellent film by students in my Literature of the Black Power Era course. The group that produced this video wanted to interrogate the influence of ideology and hegemony on the language we use to discuss the topic of terrorism in America. Their goal, in part, was to disrupt the stereotype of the "radical Arab" as the sole face of terrorism and to point out that what we call "terrorism" has existed in America for a long time through organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, American Nazis and individual criminals inspired by corrupt versions of Christian belief.

This film opens the door to discussing the idea of terrorism and its social effects on Americans more productively than most of what you will see on television. The film combines expert commentary with critical questioning of what we think we already know about this topic. What is Terrorism? was produced by Kiara Pesante, Aaron Sheperd, Mary K. Head, and Joshua Cashatt.




Racial Symbolism Today generated an abundance of discussion the day it was presented in my African American Literature course. Much of what we talked about throughout the semester dealt with symbols, representation, language, and identity. This film made my students think deeply about the importance of symbols as part of national identity, particularly for minority and colonized populations. One of the film makers, Christina Merrell, commented on the ways she was forced to rethink her readings of Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth during the production of the film. In particular, Fanon's theories of how language and symbols are used to create the colonized subject, and how the colonized have to reappropriate language as part of their true "being in the world."

Racial Symbolism Today is influenced by and grapples with Fanon and Heidegger in ways that makes for very concrete and productive discussion around issues of language and its responsible use. This film was produced by Christina Merrell, Rachel Rives, Jennifer Floyd, and Antonia Brown.




Blackness? is a film that highlights the social construction of race and the slipperiness of ideologies of race as both black and white interviewees try to define what "blackness" is.

The film reveals some interesting and even unusual ideas about what people think about "blackness" and,thereby, black people. With questions inspired in large part by our course readings of Huey P. Newton, Stokely Carmichael, and other writers of the Black Power/Black Arts movement, by the end of the video one has to question who gets to decide racial definitions. Blackness? was produced by Kelly Bolerjack, Karen Thompson, Rachel McMurray, and Reuben McCoy.




Blackness and Black Perceptions is another video from Spring 2007 that raises questions about the real-world material effects of race as a social construct. There are a number of technical difficulties that were not worked out that impact the viewing of this film, but it nevertheless rises above these weaknesses to deliver an interesting commentary on common perceptions about race from various quarters.
Blackness and Black Perceptions was produced by Matthew Dischinger, Hilton Rachal, Diana Everage, and Brittany Stewart.