You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience.

Connected Learning Alliance Logo
  • About Connected Learning
  • Who we are
  • Resources
  • Publications
  • Blog
  • Get Connected
December 21, 2011

Basta! Telling Stories About Occupy Wall Street

Author

Ethan Zuckerman
Categories: Civic Engagement, Digital Citizenship
occupy wall street protest rally people marching holding up sign that says Im a human being not a commodity

Media activists Marisa Jahn and Julian Rubinstein recently joined us at the Center for Civic Media for our weekly Civic Media Lunch series. Marisa is the new director of the People’s Production House, a New York based project that works with low income workers and youth, building capacity around media creation. Julian is an author and journalist who now works on Newsmotion.org, a civic media and documentary storytelling initiative.

Marisa walked us through some of her history as an activist and artist, showcasing some of her work as a graphic designer. For the 2008 Wall Street protests, she designed a “Bailout = Bullshit” logo and signage.

Other work has focused on curation, supporting a project by Amy Balkin to create audio tours of the Interstate 5 corridor through California. The highway features some high-pollution sites, like tire fires and chemical spills. The tour is built through community-produced audio pieces and was presented to audiences through hosted listening sessions as well as distributed at truck stops. Another curation project produced the edited volume, Byproduct, a collection of cases of “artists embedded in non-art sectors,” including the case of mimes used as traffic cops in Bogota, Colombia.LaMuralla_Working_570jpg

Other projects have been more focused on community service (and are perhaps more practical). For a project in El Pital, Honduras, Marisa created a mobile library on the back of a burro, accompanied by a character, “Bibliodandido,” who terrorizes children until they write stories for him. The Bibliobandido workshop promotes self-publishing and literacy through bookmaking in a region whose infrastructure has been decimated by both Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and a current unstable presidential regime. Older kids in the village got into the act and helped put up wanted posters and threats, encouraging children to write stories and enter their names in a mustacio’d book to avoid being terrorized.

During a residency in Tajikistan, she became fascinated by a two-line poem form called the biyat (think “Rubiyat,” which comes from the same poetic tradition.) She saw a parallel between this and the ways in which people used mobile phones in Tajikistan, making calls that lasted only the ten seconds of free time allowed by cellphone operators. This led to a contest to find the best 10-second poems, “juried by ‘the Oprah of northern Tajikistan’” and shared with the country on national radio and television.

Her work in political media is connected to work with i-witness, a grassroots advocacy group documenting the policing of protests. This work, which she did with my colleague Sasha Costanza-Chock, was able to help in the dismissal of one-third of protester arrests by comparing citizen and police footage to display police media manipulation.

In her current role as director of People’s Production House, she trains teens from New York City schools in media production and has sent trainers into the field in places like Liberia to work on media monitoring and training civil war survivors in storytelling. People’s Production House also features a media policy channel, which produces toolkits to educate people on how telecommunications policy affects lower income people and people of color.

A recent project with Domestic Workers United focuses on a law recently passed in New York State that gives nannies minimum wage, overtime and some other basic benefits. Marisa offered the example of Christine Lewis, a nanny she’s worked with on the DWU project, who’s talked about
ChristineLewis the sense of guilt a nanny can feel about caring for a child for money, and the need to give twice as much love to your own child…and the tension of feeling like if you lose your job, you’ll be cut off from the child you’re caring for and have come to love. So how do you communicate the essence of these laws to nannies via the phone? People’s Production House is now producing an interactive voice response system that offers audio readings of the laws as well as detailed explanations of rights.

Julian comes from a different background: he’s a former sports journalist who cut his teeth as a sport writer at The Washington Post, dropping box scores into sports pages. He told us about watching the transition from disinterested to deeply non-objective sports reporting, a transition that sharpened his interest in underdogs and outcasts. He spent weeks following El Duque around the minor leagues, telling the story of a celebrated Cuban pitcher trying to make it in unfamiliar America.

This interest in deep and complex storytelling led him to write a book about a truly peculiar Hungarian sports story, the tale of a minor league hockey player and Zamboni driver who ended up robbing post offices in Hungary. The book, The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, is both a portrait of this figure and a rich picture of Hungary in its transition from communism to market-based systems.

His current project, Newsmotion, emerged from trying to offer narratives of the Arab Spring through the view of eyewitnesses. Offering an overview of this complex story involves personal narratives, analysis of data and visualization.

Newsmotion, a program of People’s Production House, is building an open-source platform and toolbox for adult and youth media designed specifically to help cover Occupy Wall Street and related movements, and Marisa told us that the people building it have been working on these issues since 1999 in Seattle. The platform seeks to combine original content and curated aggregation in order to identify the best, most relevant and accurate sources, whether they’re official, unofficial or citizen sources.

One of the key challenges of the system will be finding a way to tell both the broad story – seeing the various points on a map where people are participating in the movement – and the deep story. The group is commissioning and serializing portraits of individuals to show off the complexities of these issues, with the goal of being able to tell subtle, multifaceted stories related to the issues. This sort of subtle, complex story, such as the one from nanny Christine Lewis, may need to be told over a long time, in serial, and not in a single dose.

Banner image credit: kennyysun
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennyysun/6221128743/in/photostream/
Second image credit: © Marisa Jahn, 2010
Third image credit: Anthony Clark, povertyinitiative
http://www.flickr.com/photos/povertyinitiative/3038135577/in/photostream/

Related Posts

March 15, 2023 Mobilizing Teen-Centered Research Findings for Teen-Oriented Storytelling

March 7, 2023 Call for Proposals Now Open for the Sixth Annual Connected Learning Summit

February 13, 2023 Code for What?

Categories

  • Civic Engagement
  • Connected Learning
  • Critical Perspectives
  • Digital Citizenship
  • Digital Learning
  • Edtech
  • Educational Practice
  • Equity
  • Featured
  • HX
  • New Trends
  • Research
  • Youth Well-Being

Blog Archive

  • 2023
    • February 2023
    • March 2023
  • 2022
    • January 2022
    • February 2022
    • April 2022
    • May 2022
    • June 2022
    • July 2022
    • August 2022
    • September 2022
    • October 2022
    • November 2022
    • December 2022
  • 2021
    • January 2021
    • February 2021
    • March 2021
    • April 2021
    • May 2021
    • June 2021
    • July 2021
    • August 2021
    • September 2021
    • October 2021
    • November 2021
    • December 2021
  • 2020
    • January 2020
    • February 2020
    • March 2020
    • April 2020
    • May 2020
    • June 2020
    • July 2020
    • August 2020
    • September 2020
    • October 2020
    • November 2020
    • December 2020
  • 2019
    • January 2019
    • February 2019
    • March 2019
    • April 2019
    • May 2019
    • June 2019
    • July 2019
    • August 2019
    • September 2019
    • October 2019
    • November 2019
    • December 2019
  • 2018
    • January 2018
    • February 2018
    • March 2018
    • April 2018
    • May 2018
    • June 2018
    • July 2018
    • August 2018
    • September 2018
    • October 2018
    • November 2018
    • December 2018
  • 2017
    • January 2017
    • February 2017
    • March 2017
    • April 2017
    • May 2017
    • June 2017
    • July 2017
    • August 2017
    • September 2017
    • October 2017
    • November 2017
    • December 2017
  • 2016
    • January 2016
    • February 2016
    • March 2016
    • April 2016
    • May 2016
    • June 2016
    • July 2016
    • August 2016
    • September 2016
    • October 2016
    • November 2016
    • December 2016
  • 2015
    • January 2015
    • February 2015
    • March 2015
    • April 2015
    • May 2015
    • June 2015
    • July 2015
    • August 2015
    • September 2015
    • October 2015
    • November 2015
    • December 2015
  • 2014
    • January 2014
    • February 2014
    • March 2014
    • April 2014
    • May 2014
    • June 2014
    • July 2014
    • August 2014
    • September 2014
    • October 2014
    • November 2014
    • December 2014
  • 2013
    • January 2013
    • February 2013
    • March 2013
    • April 2013
    • May 2013
    • June 2013
    • July 2013
    • August 2013
    • September 2013
    • October 2013
    • November 2013
    • December 2013
  • 2012
    • January 2012
    • February 2012
    • March 2012
    • April 2012
    • May 2012
    • June 2012
    • July 2012
    • August 2012
    • September 2012
    • October 2012
    • November 2012
    • December 2012
  • 2011
    • January 2011
    • February 2011
    • March 2011
    • April 2011
    • May 2011
    • June 2011
    • July 2011
    • August 2011
    • September 2011
    • October 2011
    • November 2011
    • December 2011
  • 2010
    • January 2010
    • February 2010
    • March 2010
    • April 2010
    • May 2010
    • June 2010
    • July 2010
    • August 2010
    • September 2010
    • October 2010
    • November 2010
    • December 2010
  • 2009
    • October 2009
    • November 2009
    • December 2009

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date with our latest news and information.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
  • Connected Learning in Teaching Practice
  • Connected Learning Research Network
  • Connected Learning in Libraries
  • Connected Educators
  • Connected Courses
  • Connected Civics
  • Institute of Play

  • Contact
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy
  • Work With Us
  • Media
  • Write for Us
  • People
  • Newsletter
  • CLRN
  • CL Summit
  • CL Lab