Media as Mediation: A Youth Media Project Proposal
Golden Hour, GA. 2017
Little Italy, February 2020.
What is this place to you? How would you explain it to someone who has never been to a rural, small town? Why is it important to do so?
These are the questions I have been asking myself since leaving for college. Living in New York City for the last two years has provoked me to ask these questions ever more intensely. I have experienced moments and met people who have challenged me to rethink all that I thought I knew about “City Slickers.” Simultaneously, I have challenged others to rethink all that they thought they knew of “Rural Folk”.
During these interactions, I realized the knowledge that we have of each “other” has been greatly informed by media representations—Hollywood movie characters, documentaries, novels, TV personalities, news reports, and viral social media posts—all of which rely on (to varying degrees) generalizations and stereotyping.
As a student of media anthropology, I have learned to ask more questions: Who is producing these representations? Who is it for? And why? Who benefits? Following this thread, it is easy to see representations of rural areas are rarely made FOR and BY the people whose lives shape them. Yet, they often form the basis for how the world outside of rural America comes to understand it.
By painting entire communities with one brush stroke, all the different perspectives that make them unique go unacknowledged. In our political moment, these surface level depictions are weaponized to further a sense of division between the urban/rural divide. More importantly, it situates our differences in the “Us vs Them” battleground, instead of acknowledging what we stand to learn about each other and ourselves because of those differences.
The Problem
““The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story the ONLY story.””
Hicksploitation in Trump Country
After the 2016 Presidential election, there was an explosion of articles, news reports, books, and videos exploring the rural, white voters that make up “Trump Country.” While these media focused on the social issues in rural America such as access to educational opportunity, unemployment, economic hardships, racism, and addiction, they, too, only seemed to care for the experiences long enough to get their “understanding” of Trump’s win—all the while subjecting entire communities of people (each individually and collectively unique) and their issues to simplified interpretations and criticisms from distant observers.
While I acknowledge fully that the issues raised by these reports are important and need to be discussed, they are often unproductive. Frequently, these media representations are speaking for and of, but not with the communities they represent in any substantial way. What’s more, rural areas like Vernon and our own community in Bethlehem rarely have access to the social capital or digital technologies necessary to speak to (and against) these representations. How can a youth media project address the violence of single-story narratives of rural communities, and carve out space for conversation and analysis of the single stories told of others? If every representation of the other is a partial construct of the self, can the process of representing the self, help us understand the other?
In 1981, filmmaker Errol Morris of New York wanted to make a film about people in Northwest Florida who had intentionally dismembered themselves to claim insurance. The film was originally going to be called “Nub City,” but it quickly changed titles (and subject) after his butt was kicked and his life was threatened. Instead, the film is about the “inhabitants of a remote swamp-town in the Florida panhandle.” This remote swamp-town (and the film’s revised title) is called Vernon, FL.
While the film is sentimental and humorous at times, it fails to acknowledge the structural issues of poverty that originally sparked his interest. Nor, did it include anyone other than the “eccentric” (mostly white, male) characters of the town—excluding people of color, women, and youth that also called Vernon home. After leaving, Morris became an established filmmaker. Screening his work for audiences in New York City, he reintroduced simple, ignorant tropes about rural living to an American Public who had very little, if any, intimate interactions with the rural Florida panhandle. Though the film helped to solidify his career as a filmmaker, nothing was contributed in return to the individual’s whose stories brought it into being.
Media representation of rural areas, and marginalized communities more broadly, are often made by people who know very little about the experiences that shape them. Because of this, they reproduce harmful narratives by extracting certain parts that are entertaining, without acknowledging their whole, complicated truth. What’s more is, they do little to nothing for the individuals whose lives are being portrayed. In the case of rural representations, this is known as hicksploitation, and it even has its own genre in Film/TV.
““Critical art is an art that aims to produce a new perception of the world, and therefore to create a commitment to its transformation.””
Our world is ever more saturated by media (mis)representations on all sides of the political, social, and cultural divide. When generalized concepts and political commentary come to replace an individual’s character and lived experience, dehumanization is almost certain.
The Solution
Representations made BY and FOR the people of this community through a youth media project. Over the last few decades, there has been a growing movement to combat media stereotyping as digital technologies became more available. People, especially young people, are taking up the tools to tell their own stories and document their communities from within. When people have the power to contribute to, or combat, narratives about themselves and their communities, real learning and change occurs.
I am proposing a media project, that explores and documents the area from the perspective of its youth. The project will be using arts education and qualitative methods as foundational guides. Participants will use a wide range of mediums including film, photography, and creative writing to tell the stories they feel are important. As a facilitator of the program, I will be teaching technical skills such as computer literacy, videography, photography, audio recording, various editing software techniques, and interviewing methods. Additionally, there are soft skills embedded in the creative process to be gained such as cooperation, problem solving, interpersonal communication, and accountability—all of which can be used in future endeavors. Because the true goal of the project is to encourage critical thinking of how media representations influence how we see “others” as well as ourselves, I will be using examples from various youth media programs and self representational projects, globally, to challenge what we thought we knew of other places and people. In doing so, I hope to share our projects with other youth media programs to challenge their perceptions the same.
Click on the pictures below to explore the projects and practices that have served as inspirations for this proposal as well as the curriculum I am building.
