In this webinar, we aim at reflecting on the potential of media activism and artivism to create more sustainable connections between Global South communities and to promote a dialogue to challenge colonial legacies and promote social justice. We explore how creative digital media practices can be used as tools for youth movement building in the Global South, by a) establishing dialogical spaces for young people and b) mobilising memories and histories. We achieve this by reporting the experience of two experimental animation workshops in which young artivists in Brazil and Kenya produced two artefacts: Portrait of Marielle and Homage to Wangari Maathai, to honour the legacies of two powerful Afro-feminist figures. We will then delve on the issue of visibility for media activists, reflecting on its dual role, visibility as recognition and visibility as tool of control. We will do so by presenting the Stepping into Visibility Model, illustrating it through the visibility journeys of activists working with PAWA254 in Kenya and inspired by the legacy of Marielle in Brazil. The webinar is based on the work done in the AHRC International Network eVoices: Redressing Marginality and on the book that stemmed from it: Media Activism, Artivism and the Fight Against Marginalisation in the Global South.
Speakers:
Andrea Medrado is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. She is the leader of the Cultural Identities and Social Change theme at the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) and the Course Leader for the BA Digital Media programme. She also worked as a tenured Associate Professor at the Federal Fluminense University. Currently, she is a Co-Investigator on the project “The Social Foundations of Cryptography” (funded by EPSRC, UK). In 2018–2019, she was a Co-I in the AHRC project “e-Voices: Redressing Marginality”. She is currently the Vice President of IAMCR. She has published widely in leading academic journals and has recently published the book “Media Activism, Artivism and the Fight Against Marginalisation in the Global South” with Isabella Rega.
Isabella Rega is Professor in Digital Media for Social Change at Bournemouth and co-chair of the Working Group on Distance Education of the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE). She has led several research projects funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the British Council, the Swiss National Fund for Research and the Swiss Agency for Cooperation. She has published articles in various journals. She serves on the advisory board of the Journal of Media Literacy Education and is a board member of IDIA (International Development Informatics Association) and CIRN (Community Informatics Research Network).
