Exploring the Origins of Photovoice

Imagine you’re an academic in South America, around the 1950’s or 60’s.  It’s a pretty exciting time to be an academic.  With the Cold War in full swing the world has become a battleground of ideas, and you are on the front lines.

You’ve just come out of university in the capital, but now eagerly leave the city and head out into the rural villages.  You’re excited to spread these new ideas- workers rights, community organizing, the history of colonialism, the latest economic practices, new agricultural techniques- but when you finally reach the village, you realize that these farmers and villagers aren’t quite what you expected.  Sure, they find your ideas interesting- but they have their own knowledge.  They have experiences, they have wisdom, and they have an intimate understanding of their society that you totally lack.  As an academic, you immediately decide that this type of knowledge needs a name, so you call it vivencia. Read more

Be sure to help fund our new project PHOTOVOICE IRAQ: Picturing Change!

Shakespeare wrote for money.  Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth would never have sprung off the page if not for royal funding.  To paint his masterpiece The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo was commissioned by the Vatican.  Having great ideas was a good start, but without the money to back them, some of history’s finest works would never have been made.

Modern venture capitalists work in a similar way.  No longer a community only of Popes and Kings, they find ideas they think will be successful and fund them.  The rise of Facebook, made famous by Hollywood, is a classic example of venture capital at work.

But what about smaller good ideas?  Ideas that make sense?  In this world of interconnectivity and sharing, how can people show support and say, “Yeah, I’d like to see that happen”?

The answer is crowdfunding.

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“Under Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, the media were nothing more than a government mouthpiece. But after the war, it was different. I saw the need to tell the world what was happening in my country.” – Bassam Sebti, former journalist for the Washington Post in Iraq

The story of Iraq’s journalists is something near to my heart. During my first couple of weeks at EPIC, I wrote a blog post about a popular journalist who had been killed, simply for doing his job. The whole time I was thinking of one of my closest friends, Justin, who’s dream is to be a reporter for the New York Times.

This year, Iraq is ranked 152 out of a total of 179 countries on the World Press Freedom Index, and as you can see from the Committee to Protect Journalists‘ page on Iraq, journalists in Iraq face significant, life-threatening dangers. Despite these threats, however, both professional journalists and citizen journalists continue to grow and fight for the freedom of the press, and have gained the respect and admiration of the global community for their resilience.

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The past six weeks have been pretty intense here at EPIC, and this blog post is long overdue (sorry Jamie!).  I don’t want to bore you with the details of how I’ve been spending every minute of every day, but there have been a few developments that are as exciting as they are pivotal for EPIC.

There’s this thing called photovoice-   Thomas wrote a blog post about it a while back.  Photovoice is 50% photo-essay and 50% sociology project, and I’m 100% obsessed with it.  It started like this: the EPIC team was having coffee with Nate Rosenblat (one of our awesome advisors) and talking about our academic “sweet spots.”  It was basically an hour and a half of nerding out, and it set off a chain of lightning-strike inspiration that led to Photovoice Iraq: Picturing Change.  There were some real Mad Men moments (Don Draper would have swirled his brandy in approval)!

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Youth are well known for breaking new ground, dreaming big, and rewriting the rules. They fight in wars, push for revolutions, and are often the first to call for reforms and change to a system of governance. Their energy and enthusiasm is often described as a source to be tapped into. And it pretty much goes without saying that a nation’s wealth is measured in part by the promise of a nation’s youth. Unfortunately, contrary to these well documented tendencies, they are not always well represented in the policies and actions of a country – and are sometimes even systematically excluded.

When youth are kept out of the political or economic world they feel isolated and disillusioned – take it from me, I graduated a year ago and still haven’t found a full time job. I am part of the youth of the United States of America, and we are a driving force for the economy, the government, and popular culture. Economists write that because of the lack of opportunity during the formative years of my career, even long after the recession has ended I will still earn less than my peers a few years younger than me. Furthermore, my attitude about work, wages, and higher education will be forever changed – something I’m likely to pass onto my children.

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