SSMF 2022: “Pause”

CAMRA Fellows Showcase

The CAMRA Fellows Showcase highlights the work of current and past CAMRA Fellows – undergraduate multimodal researchers who work with graduate student mentors to produce innovative scholarship in a variety of media. This year’s fellows and mentors use film, photography, and other modalities to explore a wide range of topics such as queer expression and healing, Black family histories, and racial inequalities in housing markets. The showcase features their works-in-progress and provides a constructive, generative space to share feedback, support, and ideas.

Moderated by Dallas Taylor & angel gutierrez, CAMRA Mellon Fellows
Friday, March 25, 2:00 PM — 4:30 PM Eastern

Panel Recording

Telling Our Stories: A Philadelphia Community Media Oral History Project

Lauren Davidson
Mentored by Antoine Haywood

Telling Our Stories is a community documentary project that features first-person narratives told by people of color who use public access television and community radio platforms to engage in local and transnational storytelling networks.

Hailing from Atlanta, Lauren Davidson is a junior studying biochemistry with minors in cinema and media studies as well as neuroscience. An aspiring physician-filmmaker, her interests in using documentary film to explore how the path towards medicine shapes itself for people of color first drew her to CAMRA. Lauren has had the privilege and honor of working with Antoine in preparation for this year’s festival.

Antoine Haywood is a Ph.D. Candidate and Penn Presidential Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. Before Annenberg, Antoine spent 15 years facilitating community engagement programs at public access cable channels. Antoine’s auto-ethnographic research explores the resonance of African American community participation in public access television.

The Cinematic Slum: Mere Gully Mein Gentrification?

Yendi Guindo
Mentored by Indivar Jonalagadda

Taking three music videos of the Bombay rap smash hit “Mere Gully Mein” (In My Street), the original by DIVINE and Naezy, an homage by FAMOUS Crew, and a Bollywood version from Gully Boy, we present a theory of the “cinematic slum” operating through three registers: “representation”; objectification ; and gentrification. The three registers are defined by differences in perspective, participation, and people-place balance. The essay is an experiment in doing ethnographically informed videographic criticism and it could be a potentially useful teaching tool bridging interests in popular media and visual anthropology.

Yendi Guindo is a CAMRA Fellow starting in 2021. Her interests include representations of Blackness in film, Black cultural spaces, alongside wide interests in anthropology, psychology, and Asian studies. She is currently an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in Anthropology.

Indivar Jonalagadda is an ethnographer, teacher, writer, and multimodal creator. Currently, he is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology and South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Race-making in Residential Real Estate

Carlos Montes
Mentored by Rachael Stephens

This year, Carlos Montes (he/they) and Rachael Stephens (she/her) explored the importance and the challenges of denaturalizing cultural categories such as “whiteness/Other-ness,” “queerness/normativity,” “good/bad neighborhood,” and so on. After working through some of the theories of cultural production, Carlos turned to Rachael’s dissertation, which examines processes of race-making in relation to school finance inequity and real estate. Carlos used this opportunity to experiment with/practice different methods for denaturalizing the multimodal processes of producing cultural categories   By looking at the prevalence and usage of cultural categories employed in real estate listings and other print media from the 20th century to the present, Carlos underscores the necessity, as well as the difficulties, of studying the production of categories that are typically taken for granted and go unquestioned. Building on these insights, Carlos will explore what a critical approach to the production of categories in his thesis project—Queerness, Status and Performance in Postdisaster Puerto Rico—could look like.

Carlos Montes is a junior at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in Anthropology and minoring in Latin American and Latinx Studies and Africana Studies. He is currently working on a project that looks at the intersection between queerness, status, and performance in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Aside from being a Penn CAMRA-Mellon Fellow, Carlos is a research assistant at The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO), a Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellow, and a University Scholar. On campus, he works at La Casa Latina, and is a member of Onda Latina.

Rachael Stephens is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Education. Her research focuses on processes of social reproduction and social change. Her dissertation explores issues of privilege and civic responsibility in the context of school finance inequality, and she aims to develop new ways to study race-making as a constitutive part of capitalist reproduction. Rachael embraces non-print modes of research and scholarship as a way to produce work that is more collaborative in its production, more accessible in its reach, and hopefully, more transgressive in its impact.

Re-Possessing Being & Time: Voguing, Queer Expression, & Healing

angel gutierrez
Mentored by Atenea Rosado-Viurques

Drawing upon Black and Indigenous Feminist scholars, activist, and artists, this projct takes inspiration from the question, “How can experimental ethnography be combined with voguing to concretely develop a Queer BIPOC archive and conceptually retake our own historicity – the ability to be of or have history?” The video uses voguing and interviews to expand upon ethnography in order to express discontent for colonialism’s dehumanizing representations of queer and racialized subjects, and forge for ourselves an ethnography of Queer expression and Black and Brown yearnings for psychic, social, and material liberation.

angel gutierrez is a sophomore studying anthropology & philosophy. Their research interests look towards their homeland within the Mexican state to understand how neoliberal interests of the state fuel displacement. Their filmmaking and performance interests focus on making kin and place-making to explore how voguing heals.

Atenea Rosado-Viurques is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania pursuing a joint PhD in Education, Culture and Society, and Anthropology. Her research focuses on critical approaches to humanitarianism in education, the experiences of teachers working in humanitarian crisis, and the impact migration policies have on non-formal pedagogy in Central America. Rosado-Viurques is a research practitioner who has worked with schools, governments, and international organizations, and who centers art-based methodologies in her research.

Black Family Accession

Tatiana Swain
Mentored by Sophie Maddocks

Black Family Accession delves into the intricacies and intimate conversations that Black families hold with one another about their traditions through a journalistic and Afro-American background. 

It focuses on four key factors through a personal camera and video lens placing the focus on my family’s traditions, cuisine, religion and music to show how each family member individually holds memories. 

By utilizing the SSMF theme “Pause,” the project compares the living situations at my family home regarding how we have collectively grown within, grown out, and grown towards self, identity, and purpose while in the COVID-19 pandemic. It explains how during a time of strife and hardship families can continue to bond and alleviate the stress that comes from unprecedented times while continuously learning from one another on how to better themselves and each other. 

Tatiana Swain is a Howard University Alumna and CAMRA Mellon Fellow, 2020 Cohort, at The University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include media relations in race, ethnicity, and gender within the news industry. Currently, she works at CBS19 WCAV-TV in Charlottesville, VA as a Producer and Writer showcasing and writing scripts for local, national, and international news stories.

Sophie Maddocks is a researcher, teacher and digital rights advocate. Particularly concerned with online gender-based violence, she has published research on image-based abuse, deep fakes and trolling. Through Fellowships at the Netter Center for Community Partnerships and the Center for Media at Risk, Sophie conducts research that’s qualitative, participatory and youth-led.
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Power Politics Oral History Project

Dallas Taylor

Power Politics is Scribe Video Center’s oral history project, exploring strategies for Black and Latinx political empowerment in the city of Philadelphia. These oral histories, which cover the period from 1945 until today, look at how communities on the outside of political power have created strategies to be self-determining – through community organizing, electoral politics, educational reform, cultural production and creating economic opportunity.

Dallas Taylor, a CAMRA Mellon Fellow, 2019 Cohort, is a creator, passionate about the potential of scholarship in contact with media. He specializes in all things audio, assisting various projects throughout the process of production, composition, mixing, and mastering.

trans/plant

nikki thomas

trans/plant is a project with layering truths and modalities: the communion among my loved ones formed through the propagation and gifting of plants, the archiving of visual family histories, the assemblage offered by the connecting branches of these histories. The photos used in the project have been collected over the past two years and showcase the growth of my plant collection across time and space as I have grown older and moved from place to place.

nikki thomas is a cat parent, recent LA transplant(er), and a Philly sports fanatic. A third year CAMRA fellow, they are currently completing their first year of PhD study at the Annenberg school at the University of Southern California. Before USC Annenberg, they got their B.A. in Africana Studies and M.S.Ed. in Education, Culture, and Society from the University of Pennsylvania

My Black Side

Ajibola Bodunrin

My Black Side is an autoethnographic exploration of my dual identity as a Nigerian Black American and the complexity of global black identity. This film centers on myself and my family as we navigate what it means to connect and learn from each other living in a dual cultural household. My Black Side offers an intimate look into our family to highlight the challenges that black people across the diaspora face as they try to forge connections through cultural differences.

Ajibola Bodunrin is a second-year grad student at Villanova University in the School of Communication.He has a passion for storytelling in all forms. Black culture and history is a major inspriration for his work.

Bardo

Jean Chapiro
Mentored by Atenea Rosado-Viurques

This short documentary centers around Marne Lucas, an artist and end-of-life doula whose work centers around collaborating with terminally ill artists as she helps them produce what will become their last show or legacy project. But this film is also a reflexive piece about the ethics of storytelling and both the privilege and responsibility of being a storyteller.

Jean Chapiro is a filmmaker and journalist from Mexico City. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 with a major in Communication, Cinema Studies, and Visual Studies. Through her work Jean is interested in exploring the intersections between storytelling, entertainment, realism, and investigative journalism. She is currently attending the Columbia Journalism School documentary program. She is currently working on a documentary about “end of life” and a long-form story about femicides in Mexico. 

Atenea Rosado-Viurques is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania pursuing a joint PhD in Education, Culture and Society, and Anthropology. Her research focuses on critical approaches to humanitarianism in education, the experiences of teachers working in humanitarian crisis, and the impact migration policies have on non-formal pedagogy in Central America. Rosado-Viurques is a research practitioner who has worked with schools, governments, and international organizations, and who centers art-based methodologies in her research.