Black Feminist Multimedia | Women's Studies 185 MY
Spring 2006, Tuesdays 2pm-5pm, Kerr Hall Digital Editing Lab
Professor Mireille Miller-Young

This advanced-level seminar will instruct students in how to utilize multimedia technologies, including the Internet, web and graphic design, and digital filmmaking and editing, to theorize various aspects of Black feminism.

A central class website will function as a portal to individual, satellite websites for each student, and as a base site for the creation of networks between other Black feminist artistic, political, educational, or culturally oriented websites and our class website. In fact, the entire class will exist as a multimedia platform seeking to connect to a broader, global Black feminist digital network.

In addition, each student will author a satellite website that will be an interactive space for posting written analyses of various Black feminist multimedia texts as well as their own digital media projects on aspects of Black feminist critical theory such as sexual politics, HIV/AIDS, body image, visual representation, gender norms, domestic violence, sex work, labor equity, globalization, or racial/ethnic identity formations.
This seminar is the first of its kind at UC Santa Barbara, and will be the beginning of a larger pedagocial project of engaging media theories and practices focused on women of color.

We will analyze the scholarship of a range of feminist authors and artists, including Deborah Willis, Carla Williams, Renee Green, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Lorraine O'Grady, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Coco Fusco, Ann duCille, Jennifer Gonzalas, bell hooks, Judith Wilson, and others.

The intention of this course is to train students to read an array of multimedia sources, from film, video, sound, and the Internet to traditional texts and images, as rich spaces for the production of Black Feminist Critical Theory.

However, this course will move beyond merely reading and discussing such a range of textual, visual, and sound-based sources, to actually train students in the creation of digital video projects that will be situated on class websites.

The educational goals of this endeavor are multiple. Firstly, students will read critical feminists texts on representation and political economy of Black women in media and become critical theorists via a weblog, or Blog. Through this practice students will become familiar with not only navigating the websphere, but also the practice of strategically intervening in cyberdiscourses around gender, race, sexuality, class, and feminism.

Finding useful sources about the lives and concerns of Black women online is challenging. In an effort to participate in the organizing of digital sources on various aspects of Black feminism, we will collaborate with Women’s Studies librarian, Sherri Barnes, and contribute to her self-authored website: Black American Feminisms: A Multidisciplinary Bibliography: www.library.ucsb.edu/subjects/blackfeminism. The purpose of this collaboration will be to train students in the literature of the field while also introducing them to the process of creating a bibliography for their projects via the web.

Next, students learn to locate, analyze, and critique feminist websites in ways they normally associate with studies of literature or film. Students will study a variety of feminist and non-feminist websites individually and collectively, during classes in the media lab. Each student will be responsible for creating their own website which will host a “webography” of sites they have researched that will form the intellectual basis for their final projects.

Students will produce a two-part Self Portrait project, which will entail a multimedia exploration of their feminist or gender identities. The first part will be a 1 minute digital video, which will be created using sound or music, and web-based or other images. The second part of the Self Portrait Project will be a 3-5 minute digital video that will be an extension of the 1 minute video, but will also allow students to include digital video recordings which they must capture.

The final project will be a Feminist Documentary Video Project, on one aspect of Black feminism. These videos, which will be approximately 10-12 minutes in length, will take on a documentary approach to engage a specific problematic or issue of feminist theory. Students are encouraged to be creative and produce dynamic projects using multiple sources and media.

All video projects will be edited by students in the Kerr Hall Media Lab under the guidance of Digital Editing Lab Manager, Anita David. Each video project will be converted to digital streaming video and then posted, by students, onto their own class websites.

Each student will have intellectual and creative input not only on their own class websites, but also the central class website and fellow student websites. Group critiques of the web and video projects will aid students in learning ways in which to think critically about their projects and how they relate to others as new media.
Indeed, instantaneous connectivity and exchange is one of the advantages of web media that this class hopes to empower students to gain a stake in, complicate, challenge, and manipulate.

This course will investigate the following questions:

What are the transgressive politics of a pedagogy invested in employing new media technologies to the critical project of Black feminism?

In light of the ways in which new media technologies have advanced and complicated issues of representation, communication and access for Black women, how can these self-authored student web-based projects intervene in cyberprofiling and other new technologies of race, gender and sexual repression?

Can this course advance a transgressive politics of technological self-configuration, networking, and connectivity for the next generation of Black feminists?

What are the challenges, limits, or unimagined implications of a pedagogy invested in using technologies that are deeply embedded in the surveillance and management of Black bodies, and how can we begin to re-program new technologies for progressive, critical, and community oriented systems of analysis?