Posts Tagged ‘participatory media’

Chinese Visual Ethnography Conference This Weekend at USC

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Cultural Dimensions of Visual Ethnography: U.S.- China Dialogues
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089
Conference locations (various locations, please see program listed below); Film screenings (Leavey Auditorium)
April 8-10, 2010
Time: 12:00PM – 7:30PM
Please RSVP to Jia Tan at jiatan@usc.edu

How has visual ethnography shifted from becoming a discipline of “first world” filmmakers traveling to film “third world” people to a more complex and dialogical series of exchanges?  Moving away from this bi-polar perspective to see the world in more complex and subtle terms, how have the audience for ethnographic documentaries shifted in recent years?  How are ethnographic documentaries influenced by controversies about minority nationalities and ethnicity?  What is the relationship between visual ethnography and the commercial videos produced for tourism promotion? What is the role of autobiographical or first person documentaries in defining a cultural perspective? What role do videos play in maintaining transnational connections among dispersed families and communities in China and the US? How do websites and web-based blogs serve to maintain transnational ties?

Full schedule after the break.

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CinemaTalk: a Conversation with Tami Blumenfield

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

dGenerate Films presents CinemaTalk, an ongoing series of conversations with esteemed scholars of Chinese cinema studies.  These conversations are presented on this site in audio podcast and/or text format.  They are intended to help the Chinese cinema studies community keep abreast of the latest work being done in the field, as well as to learn what recent Chinese films are catching the attention of others.  This series reflects our mission to bring valuable resources and foster community around the field of Chinese film studies.

Tami Blumenfield (photo courtesy of University of Washington / Tami Blumenfield)

Tami Blumenfield (photo courtesy of University of Washington / Tami Blumenfield)

Tami Blumenfield is a Lecturer at the University of Washington. Her research mainly focuses on the education and media representation of minorities in southwest China, especially the Moso and Na. Her teaching areas cover movement and media representation in contemporary China, indigenous media, kinship studies, visual anthropology, and anthropology of education. Tami Blumenfield is also one of the organizers of the Moso Media Projects, which comprises the Moso Film Festival, participatory media production, and ethnographies of Moso Media.

In this conversation with dGenerate’s Kevin Lee, Tami shares her engagement and interaction with the Moso community, and articulates the effect of filmmaking process on local people and culture with vivid examples from her own experience. She draws particular attention to the ethics of representation, the significance of collaborative projects, and the role of filmmakers and researchers from an anthropological point of view.

Play the Podcast (Time: 22:04)

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Download it here (right-click to download). (File size: 20.7 MB)

Click through for a list of Tami’s publications and a timecoded index of topics covered in the interview.

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