BACK HOUSE PRODUCTIONS, REACH NOLA, & COMIX

presents

Freestyle Love Supreme:

Purpose Party for New Orleans

VideoVoices Project




Freestyle Love Supreme and COMIX are throwing a Purpose Party to raise funds for the New Orleans VideoVoices Project! Join Tony Award-winners Lin-Manuel Miranda and Bill Sherman plus Chris Jackson, Chris “Shockwave” Sullivan, Utkarsh Amudkar, Wade Allain-Marcus and Anthony Veneziale along with special guests for an evening of amazing hip-hop comedy for a great cause. Directed by Thomas Kail.

We will be having some awesome silent auction items up for bid (ITH Tickets and more!) and it’s going to be an excellent show.

The New Orleans VideoVoices Project works to build a groundswell of voices for change using community media, inspiring hard hit communities to tell their stories.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 8th
@ COMIX COMEDY CLUB
355 West 14th Street
7 pm and 9:30 pm

Tickets: $50 Advance / $60 (day of)
Students: $20 Advance / $25 (day of)


www.comixny.com

The New Orleans VideoVoices Project is a  REACH NOLA, VideoVoice Collective and community partnership.

For more information please visit:
www.video-voice.org or www.reachnola.org

-Freestyle Love Supreme

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Join us for a presentation on participatory video and human rights in New Orleans at the 2008 Human Rights Center Conference!

Conference, November 6, 2008, 10AM to 5PM
Alumni House, UC Berkeley

Health, Human Rights and Vulnerable Communities - 10:00 AM to 12 Noon (Toll Room)

Faculty Discussant: Cheri Pies, School of Public Health

• Caricia Catalani, School of Public Health, Berkeley, Participatory Video in New Orleans, USA

Abstract
Billions of people worldwide have gained access to the Internet, digital recording devices, and other new media tools.  More and more, these new media tools are used as innovative solutions to enduring human rights struggles, however often without critical understanding of their potential strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.  To begin to understand these aspects of new media more thoroughly, this evaluation of the New Orleans Videovoice Project describes the processes and outcomes associated with a particular participatory video methodology: videovoice.

Like its predecessor photovoice, videovoice involves partnering with communities to research health and human rights situations by putting digital cameras in the hands of everyday people.  The New Orleans Videovoice Project took place in Central City, an underserved nieghborhood that was hit hard in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Those who have returned from displacement have faced a difficult recovery period involving loss of family and friends, loss of housing and possessions, closures of primary sources of health care, marginalization by government and its recovery programs, and the ongoing stress of piecing one’s life and the community back together.

The New Orleans Videovoice Project arose out of a need to organize around human rights and health concerns at this critical time.  By building a partnership of diverse community members from the Central City neighborhood, public health researchers, filmmakers, and human rights advocates, the project has produced several participatory documentary videos.  The videos describe the neighborhood’s historical and current struggle for human rights, and their own solutions for a better future.  Beyond videos, this highly participatory project has resulted in other critical outcomes, such as increased capacity to produce media, understanding of community strengths and concerns, individual empowerment, and engagement in community action.

• Krista Kshatriya, School of Law, Berkeley, World Health Organization/Southeast Asia Regional Office, India
• Miranda Ritterman, School of Public Health, Berkeley, Christian Children’s Fund, Angola
• Nobuko Mizoguchi, Demography, Berkeley, Global Health Access Project, Thai-Burma border

Lunch Break - 12 noon to 1:30 PM

World premiere screenings, followed by dinner reception and filmmaker discussion session.

• Friday, August 22, 7:pm at Ashe Cultural Center, New Orleans
• Saturday, August 23, 5:pm (previously scheduled 3:pm screening has been changed) at Zeitgeist Multimedia Arts Center, New Orleans

Hello, it’s been a while but I’m excited to say that Caricia and I are in New Orleans, LA and beginning our VideoVoice/New Orleans project. We’ve been walking around Central City - the community within Orleans Parish (aka New Orleans) - that we will be working with. Here are some pictures of the neighborhood:

The picture on the left is the parking lot mural at the Ashe Cultural Center and on the right is Caricia on Camp Street (just south of Central City).

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Have you ever created a word or excel document with a bunch of website addresses, just so you wouldn’t forget them all? Have you ever sent a friend or colleague a bunch of links that you ran across, because you knew it was right up their alley? Is it getting hard for you to manage the hundreds of bookmarks that you saved on browser? Well… then you were working a lot harder than you have to! Online bookmarking makes all of this easier. And, as a doctoral student that spends a lot of time finding resources on the web, this has helped me to stay sane… and even be helpful to other researchers in my field.

Here is an excerpt by Lisa Pickoff-White from our Participatory Media Guidebook, which I describe in the last blog, explaining what bookmarking is and how to use it to make your life easier.

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