This is the final part of the interview with four Penn Doctoral students who contribute to the Media Pedagogy Lab, CAMRA. They are preparing for the First Annual Screening Scholarship Series Festival this Sunday, an event that CAMRA is co-sponsoring.
Part 1 of the interview is here.
Part 2 of the interview is here.
MTW: The upcoming Screening Scholarship Media Festival is the inaugural
event of its kind at Penn. In what ways, if any, do you measure the
success and effectiveness of the festival?
Matthew Tarditi (Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education): For me, the sheer nature of the process is a measure of success for me. Truly collaborative, creative, supportive and facilitated by technology, the organization of the festival modeled the guiding principles of CAMRA and the essential elements for building partnership and community among our members and affiliates.
Even so, it would be dishonest of me to say that I am not concerned with attendance and basic efficiency and smoothness of operations as two main measures of success/effectiveness; however, the quality of the experience and not the quantity of the attendees is my main concern. That being said, we want SSMF to be a forum for sharing, collaborating, questioning and exploring, and based on the characteristics of the participants and attendees, as well as my own penchant for community building, I am confident that the festival will leave me satisfied with the experience yet hungry for more of its kind.
Leya Matthew (Education): That’s a good question. On a personal level, as a researcher, it will be on the basis of questions and discussions that bear directly on the issues I struggle with as I use video/audio as a research method. In that sense it is a way to plug into a larger community that is invested in the questions I struggle with.
At an institutional level it is one step in legitimization; at recognizing non-textual works as scholarship, which is why it is a hybrid between a Media Festival and a conference. That is a very conscious and strategic space we are trying to define, where a peer-reviewed screening will be treated with the same seriousness as a conference presentation or an academic paper.
Sofia Chaparro (Educational Linguistics): The fact that we've been able to organize the festival at all, that we've received institutional support from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, the Annenberg School for Communication, and the Graduate School of Education, as well as student organizations such as GAPSA, and most importantly the excitement of those who hear about it, to me already makes it a successful endeavor.
The goal really is to bring together a community of students, scholars and media-makers who are concerned with innovating the way we do research in the academy through the use of diverse media and technologies, and thinking about the implications that such innovations bring for the process of knowledge production itself and the wider impact of our work.
Arjun Shankar (Anthropology and Education): I think the success of the festival will be measured by the types of dialogue that go on in each of the sessions. If audience members and presenters are able to collectively and openly think about ethical and theoretical issues, then I think we would have met the festivals goals.
What I am most afraid of is outright dismissal of particular products or points of view because of a dogmatic stance regarding what research should be, etc. That is precisely what we aren't about. I am hoping that the first assumptions of everyone present is that there are valuable leanings to be had, and to really spend the time to understand how to incorporate these leanings into their own practice within and outside of the academy.
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