AMC 2008

Check back. We'll be adding more and more workshop listings here.

Shaping the Internet the fun and easy way
Presenters: Peoples Production House Digital Expansion Initiative
Have you always wanted to take on the Internet policy wonks, the geeks, the paid consultants, the corporate lobbyists, and the politicians, but felt like you lacked the know-how? This highly interactive workshop is for you. Using cardboard, crayons, and candy, you'll learn key concepts of Internet policy and technology, including bandwidth, protocol, and network architecture. This workshop will cut through the traditional race, class and gender divisions that typically frame who the "experts" in media policy and technology are. This workshop is also useful for experts who want to become better teachers. All participants will leave with greater power and self-sufficiency to advocate for the Internet that will best serve their needs. Presented by participants in the Digital Expansion Initiative of Peoples Production House.

People's Statistics: Part II - Putting Participatory Research to Work!
Presenters:Detroit Summer's Live Arts Media Project; Research for Revolution; former members of Sista II Sista
Join us for a continuation of the much-loved People's Statistics workshop at AMC 2007. Collectively, we'll share strategies for developing and using survey-based participatory research in campaigns around education, school safety, and violence against young women. We'll analyze struggles and successes through role-playing and talk about how to make sure we address the intersections of race, gender, gender identity and sexuality based oppressions in our research & organizing. And we'll brainstorm ways of overcoming challenges together!

Youth media to what end?
Presenters: Global Action Project, Radio Rootz, Appalshop, Youth Rights Media, Detroit Summer, Esperanza Peace and Justice Center
Many in the youth media field believe that they are doing social justice work by simply working with youth of color or youth from underserved communities and exploring issues that impact them. While that work may tackle important social issues, it does not necessarily fulfill its potential to affect social change. This panel will share strategies from several youth media organizations, who are connecting youth voice with social justice movements.

Strategic Framing and Messaging
Presenters: Global Action Project
We believe it is essential to think strategically when making media. In order to do that, we must understand how and why the dominant media frames our communities and experience in a certain light, and then build our own strategies to create media that reflects our values and reframes our experience on our own terms. This workshop is very interactive, and combines small group work with larger group discussions, hands-on production, and story-telling. We want participants to build and learn from each other's experiences, gain media literacy skills, and develop a visual strategy tool they can use to advance their work.

Social Justice & Zine Making
Presenters: Young Women's Empowerment Project
In this interactive session we will make a zine together! Learn YWEP's quick and dirty method of making zines on the fly! Young Women's Empowerment Project is a social justice based harm reduction organization working with girls and transgender girls involved in the sex trade and street economy. We have been making zines since our very first day together. We emphasize self-care and social justice and our zines always have a theme or a message about a topic we care about at the time. Past zines have been: F**K the Police, Real Srug Information, Eyes Wide Open, a series of zines on the sex trade and many more…

Using Google Maps for Youth Community Organizing
Presenters: Little Village Environmental Justice Organization / Open Youth Networks
Google maps enables users to embed pictures and videos. By adding pictures and videos that tell the stories of the issues in communities across the globe, one can network and exchange strategies with other groups. In this interactive and hands-on workshop, we will show "The Cloud Factory," a youth produced video about environmental racism in the Mexican-American neighborhood of Little Village. We will also present our mapzine and teach others to contribute digital content and essentially use Google maps as a tool of social action and community organizing. Workshop participants will create personal stories about the environment through digital media and embed them onto Google maps.

Grassroots Radio Production: Telling and to the Point
Presenters: Rustbelt Radio;
Free Speech Radio News
This workshop is radio production/writing for radio 101. How is writing for radio different from writing for print? How is writing for grassroots radio different from writing for corporate radio? In this workshop you will learn the basics of community journalism--from the 5Ws to examining sources, research and events. You will also learn important elements for Radio Broadcasting, such as recording techniques, and the importance of ambient sound. You will walk away with a lede/intro to a radio piece on an issue that you care about, and lots of ideas for where to take your story from there.

Graphics for the Commons
Presenters: The Beehive Collective
The purpose of this workshop is to build connections between activists that use words, and those that speak in pictures, to help create more accessible, powerful campaigns for the important issues of our time. The Beehive Collective has been creating and distributing anti-copyright, educational artwork for the past 7 years about social and environmental issues from biotechnology to the FTAA. In this workshop, we will use 'mind-mapping' as a tool to collect, organize and share the ideas generated by the whole group.

Recess: One girl's struggle between getting an education and getting schooled
Presenters: Una Aya Osato
This workshop will begin with a live performance of a multi-media one-woman show Recess. Recess is a play created from the experience of the author, Una Aya Osato, attending and teaching in NYC public schools. It confronts the state of today's public school system where struggles for power, criminalization of the youth and the effects of a suffocating bureaucracy are an every day reality. Through Recess, participants will experience how performance can be used to make abstract ideas real and personal in the classroom. We will discuss other ways of incorporating theater and performance into classrooms and together begin to generate solutions to the larger questions of how education can become humane and liberatory for all.

The Art of Awesome Facilitation
Presenter: Adrienne Maree Brown
For organizers, skillful facilitation might be the most important media tool we can cultivate. How do we create the spaces where the diverse members of an organization, community, family, etc. can come together and communicate in a way that is respectful and effective and that draws out every person's best ideas? Come spend time with Facilitation Evangelist Adrienne Maree Brown and learn how to make any meeting, gathering or event burst with energetic input and creative outcomes. This workshop will cover: Your Facilitation Personality, Best (and Worst) Practices, Asking the Right Questions, and Ground Rules. This will be a popular education so expect to participate and co-create!

Challenging the Dominant Historical Narrative: Tactical Sign Projects by the Pocho Research Society and the Howling Mob Society
Presenters: Nicholas Lampert, Sandra de la Loza, Members of the Howling Mob Society
This panel presentation examines the work of two radical art collectives. The Pittsburgh-based Howling Mob Society (HMS) created a historical sign project that would draw attention to the Railroad Strike of 1877, one of the most significant and violent labor strike's in US history. The Pocho Research Society, in their own words is "a collective of artists, activists and rasquache historians who reside in Los Angeles. Dedicated to the systematic investigation of space, memory and displacement, the PRS understands history as a battleground of the present, a location where hidden & forgotten selves hijack & disrupt the oppression of our moment." This presentation will provide a myriad of ideas for artists, activists and organizers to consider creating similar tactical sign projects in their communities.

US-Palestine Youth Solidarity Network Live Video Conference
Presenters: US-Palestine Youth Solidarity Network
Following the previous day's workshop with PEP (Palestine Education Project) and a parallel workshop conducted in the West Bank amongst youth members of the centers we partner with, the US-Palestine Youth Solidarity Network (YSN) will host a live video-conference with youth in Palestine. The PEP workshop at the AMC and the workshop in Palestine will both have introduced digital stories, music videos, radio spots, and other media created by youth in both the U.S. and Palestine and this live video conference will be a chance for them to hear each other's thoughts and questions. This idea was proposed by the YSN partners in Palestine so that their young members can get a chance to see how the digital stories and music they've created during YSN workshops are being used and what impact they're having.

Evolving the Human Element of Hip Hop: Party promotion as an organizing tool
Presenters: The Fifth Element
This workshop will feature and highlight artists who utilize their craft to create spaces that transform their communities. What are the sustainable economic models of party promotion and event production that support positive and progressive agendas? How can we create more of these transformed spaces across the country? How do organizers improve their skill in putting events together? Can organizations pair with promoters to create these kinds of spaces? This workshop will draw lessons from the experiences of 5th Element, a collective of women who use hip hop to challenge sexism and misogyny by producing shows and workshops highlighting positive artists.

Film Presentations

Slingshot Hip Hop (Sundance Film Festival 2008 Official Selection)
Jackie Reem Salloum, director, will answers questions following the screening
Slingshot Hip Hop braids together the stories of young Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank as they discover Hip Hop and employ it as a tool to surmount divisions imposed by occupation and poverty. From internal checkpoints and Separation Walls to gender norms and generational differences, this is the story of young people crossing the borders that separate them. There will be a discussion with the director and producers following the film.

Using What You Got to Create and Promote: Grassroots video production
Presenters: 2-Cent Entertainment
This workshop uses the model of 2-Cent Entertainment, a grassroots video production project in New Orleans, Louisiana, to teach how to make and promote accessible and entertaining video with a political intent. 2-Cent produces a 28-minute regular television show that is broadcast on local New Orleans stations, in addition to online distribution. They have collaborated with the People's Hurricane Relief Fund, to produce music videos, a short PSA that cleverly targets "disaster tourists" exploiting our community, and much more. In this workshop we will share important lessons about creating and promoting high-quality, accessible work with little to no resources.

Manifesting Spirit through the Arts
Presenter: Idris Hassan
This session will focus on how creativity is a direct link to spirituality and how this energy can fuel activism and healing in our communities. Bay Area Cypher is a performance documentary that blends live freestyle performances with short interviews and historical footage to document the unique evolution of Hip Hop in the Bay Area. The piece discusses how creative expression is a manifestation of spiritual expression, and how spiritual expression can expand every area of our existence.

Doin It: Sex Disability and Videotape & Why They Gotta Do Me Like That? The Fe Fes Take On Bullying
Presenters: The Empowered Fe Fes
These two films were created by The Empowered Fe Fes, a group of girls from Chicago who have disabilities and come together to make a difference. "Doin It" is a daring and humorous investigation into the uncharted intersection between disability and sexuality. In the video, the Fe Fes look at everything from a feminist sex shop to the history of the eugenics movement to control the sexuality of people with disabilities, which persists today. In "Why They Gotta Do Me Like That" the Fe Fe's show us how we can work together to understand and stop school-based discrimination, particularly against people with disabilities. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the Fe Fes on how these videos can be used to transform our schools, communities, organizations and the world.

Youth Social Justice Videos from The Factory
Presenters: Bay Area Video Collective
This screening forum will give attendees the chance to view and discuss brand-new social justice shorts by youth from the Oakland Bay Area. Five teen filmmakers from The Factory will present and discuss their work covering a range of topics from the effects of NAFTA on immigration to post-traumatic stress amongst urban youth to reparations for African-Americans. The Factory is an Oakland-based digital filmmaking program of the Bay Area Video Coalition that engages teens to produce creative works bound for national exhibition. With an emphasis on creative and political expression, youth artists work collaboratively to produce professional quality work that aims to bring youth perspective, culture, and talent to a wide audience.