Visual Learning Conference

September 30, 2012
8:30-10:00 AM, WCC 233

Ethics of Visual Representation in Liberal Arts Classrooms: A Media Arts Perspective
Laska Jimsen, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Carleton College

Sending students out of the classroom to collect visual representations brings up complicated ethical questions, whether we ask them to, for example, conduct video interviews on campus or do street photography abroad. How can we, as educators, prepare students to think ethically? What is the line between encouraging ethical behavior and censoring students' individual working processes and ideologies? This workshop presented these questions through the lens of educators working in different academic disciplines and with varied approaches to visual representation.

I shared experiences I have had teaching media production in diverse settings. In addition to teaching Cinema & Media Studies at Carleton College, I have taught in the School of Communications & Theater at Temple University, a large, urban, state school, the Department of Fine & Performing Arts at the suburban, Jesuit St. Joseph's University, the College of Art & Design and the Pre-College Program at University of the Arts, a private art school in downtown Philadelphia, and as a video consultant for Scribe Video Center's community-based Precious Places Project.

Laska Jimsen teaches film production courses in a variety of genres, including Digital Foundations, Nonfiction, Fiction, and Advanced Production Workshop.  She works across nonfiction forms from video documentary to artisanal 16mm filmmaking and animation. The 16mm print of her film "Miss Rose Fletcher: A Natural History" has screened at the MadCat, Athens, and Iowa City Experimental film festivals as well as the Moles Not Molars and Emergency reading series in Philadelphia and Structuring Strategies at CalArts. Laska’s credits as Associate Producer and Researcher include programming for the BBC, Channel 4, and PBS, including The American Experience and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

When looking involves ‘taking,’ who is receiving?
John Thabiti Willis, Assistant Professor of History, Carleton College

In December of 2010, a Carleton student and I traveled to the suburban town of Otta, Nigeria to film and photograph masquerade art and performances and to interview organizers of these events.  The aim was to collect visual materials for a course – Masquerades in Africa. This presentation drew from a particular moment during the trip when tensions surfaced and impeded in the “image taking” process as individuals from the community of the photographed “subjects” sought to re-negotiate the terms of our filming. It highlighted the (sometimes) different perspectives of the photographer and the photographed “subject(s).”

John Thabiti Willis received his Ph.D. from Emory University in 2008. He spent two years conducting research on the masquerades of the Yoruba people in Nigeria, serving as a Fulbright scholar in 2006. He has participated in international faculty seminars in Cape Town, South Africa. His courses cover the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-independence periods and include such topics as the slave trade, gender and ethnicity, nationalism, expressive culture and performance, and religion as well as the African Diaspora in the Arab world.

Combining Text, Dialogue and Images to Develop Cultural Awareness
Elizabeth Bowditch '81, Technology Integration Division, Foreign Language Center, Defense Language Institute

Handout/description:
Daily urban life in China

The study of culture is commonly reduced to the “big C, little c” distinction, reflecting the different ways the term has been defined across the liberal arts. The achievements of a civilization as evidenced in its architecture, art, literature, etc., are typically encompassed in the former. By contrast, the latter refers to life as it is lived on a daily basis by members of that society.

In the field, attempting to disaggregate different types of culture as they have been delineated in the classroom can prove challenging. More relevant to the ability of outsiders to operate in that culture is an awareness of  local protocol. For example, the need to remove footwear upon entering a place of worship or a private home. Or how to beckon people politely. In addition, to make sense of the social environment, visitors require awareness of the types of actors whom they will encounter who may behave and interact with each other in ways difficult for an outsider to comprehend.

In this presentation, offered examples of both situations taken from the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center. My presentation illuminated how cultural awareness is facilitated through text description, local language dialogue exchanges developed for non-linguists and illustrative images. I concluded by discussing my own experiences in finding appropriate images through creative commons. 

Elizabeth Bowditch is a 1981 graduate of Carleton College where she majored in History. She went on to study Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan for two years and was in the first class of the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies. She later worked for the UN-FAO as a socio-economic researcher analyzing the impediments to growth in poorer areas of rural China. In the 1990s, she earned a PhD in Political Science from UCLA. For the past six years, she has worked for the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA., preparing field support materials.