Interview with Students from CAMRA, a 3-part series

This Sunday, CAMRA (a Media Pedagogy Lab at Penn) GSE, and the Annenberg School for Communication will co-sponsor the First Annual Screening Scholarship Media Festival at Penn.  The festival will run for most of the day, and will allow attendees to explore how, as the website says, "diverse and creative uses of multimedia are changing knowledge production and the research imagination."

I had a chance to catch up with a few of the Penn student contributors of  CAMRA to find out a little more about the lab and the upcoming festival.  

The four students I interviewed are all in Ph.D programs: Matthew Tarditi (Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education), Leya Matthew (Education), Sofia Chaparro (Educational Linguistics) and Arjun Shanker (Anthropology and Education).

This is Part 1 of 3.  Part 2 will be posted Wednesday, and Part 3 will be posted Thursday.


MTW: CAMRA has an ambitious mission.  What does this mission and the goals of the group mean to you personally?


Matt: There are many aspects of CAMRA's mission that speak to me.  The creative, artistic and rigorous incorporation of multimedia technologies, specifically film for me, in all stages of the research process and the overall academic project are both exciting and necessary as the world becomes increasingly digital and audio-visual.  Multimedia not only speaks to a larger audience, but more importantly, it affords researchers like myself boundless possibilities for representing research, producing knowledge, and collaborating with partners, communities and research participants.  Relatedly, there are exciting pedagogical openings and opportunities enriched by technology broadly, and multimedia technology more specifically.  

It is because of these rich opportunities associated by multimedia technologies that I am drawn to CAMRA.  Most personally of these are the artistic/creative and collaborative affordances.  In sum, informed and guided by a strong collaborative orientation, the mission of CAMRA is also my personal mission as a practitioner, researcher and being in the world.  

Leya: I think CAMRA is on one level an acknowledgment of the growing diversity of the academic population.  As people from other knowledge traditions like filmmaking bring diverse ways of knowing the world into the academy, epistemological and ontological disorientations are bound to creep up. It becomes necessary that positions taken for granted be taken up for scrutiny yet again, be it who has claims for knowledge production or even what scholarship looks like.  In one way, I find it astounding that knowledge claims have succeeded, for so long, to retain the supremacy of one specific medium - text. At the same time, I also see a tendency to translate textual scholarship into film, maybe too literally. Nevertheless, it is exciting to build this community here at Penn, to re-imagine scholarship in ways that make research exciting, and anxious in some ways. I say anxious because new techniques also raise up questions of ethics in urgent ways. This is not new, anthropologists have been struggling with these questions for a very long time, which is probably why we trace our intellectual debts to anthropology in many ways.

Sofia:  I was initially very drawn to the use of film and visual media in research for its potential in reaching wider audiences, something particularly important for me as a former teacher and educational researcher.  At the same time, using film in my field site last year made me realize that it impacts every step of the process, not just the dissemination stage. So that film becomes as much a product as a process that will impact the research relationships I develop with my participants, the interpretations and analysis that I gather from my data, and the ethical questions I must address in the process of representation.

Arjun: For me, CAMRA represents a changing way of thinking about knowledge production in the university.  Firstly, and this is really important, it means including voices in the conversation which have previously been marginalized or excluded completely.  I have been thinking a lot about participatory methods, which necessarily mean deciding who has access to and can disseminate research - whether it's filmmakers, teachers, students, etc.  An academy which takes these voices seriously will not only be a more ethical place, but also a much more lively intellectual community.  For me, it also means a new way to think creatively about research; what technology has done is force me to critique textual practice itself.  For example, if we can begin exploring fictional methods in film then why not in text as well?  What artistic openings are we afforded?   


Part 2 will be posted Wednesday.