Yuya Takeda will be defending his PhD research proposal from 3:00 – 5:00 PM on Tuesday, March 3rd, in Room 1306, PCOH (6445 University Boulevard).
All are welcome to attend.
Supervisory Committee:
Dr. Ryuko Kubota (Research Supervisor), Dr. Kedrick James (Committee Member), Dr. André Mazawi (Committee Member)
Title: Participatory Filmmaking, Civic Engagement, Critical Literacy.
Abstract:
As it was the case in the late 19th to early 20th century with popularization of telephone technologies, innovations in communication technology are dramatically reconfiguring social and cultural relationships. The participatory nature of today’s media environment has been destabilizing the boundaries between professionals and amateurs, and between producers and consumers. While such a change certainly opens up new channels for people to participate in public discourses, it also appears to be provoking and precipitating political turmoil.
Against such a backdrop, it is imperative for education to respond to the changing media landscape and cultivate learners’ critical media literacy. I define critical media literacy as a set of competencies and dispositions in analyzing media messages to critique representations of people and things that maintain inequitable social relationships and to enact transformations of oppressive discourses. Critical (media) literacy here is conceived as praxis rather than unified theory. With this conceptualization, tensions and contradictions internal to the foundation of critical (media) literacy will be rendered generative for new ways of reading. For instance, I will instrumentalize different orientations to criticality in Marxist historical materialism and Foucauldian genealogy, and utilize the tensions between them to pose further questions.
Working with international students attending a Canadian university, this case study explores pedagogical and methodological possibilities of participatory documentary filmmaking. Through documenting the process of the participatory filmmaking with video-recordings, field notes, interviews, and researcher’s journal, and analyzing them with discourse analysis, I will endeavour to respond to following questions: (1) In what ways do participants participate in the process of documentary filmmaking?; (2) How does documentary filmmaking contribute to participants’ cultivation of critical media literacy?; (3) How do participants come to understand their own subject positions in the process of documentary filmmaking?; (4) How is my power exercised in the process of participatory documentary filmmaking? This study contributes to generating new knowledge by not only integrating critical media literacy, participatory filmmaking, and pedagogy for the privileged, but also by paying close attention to the theoretical tensions, the idea of “participation,” and my own subject positions as a researcher and a pedagogue.
This event will take place on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.