AMC 2008

Presenters: Zane Scheuerlein and Marisol Becerra 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.

Presenters: Palestine Education Project, Hook Productions, MNN Youth Channel

The US-Palestine Youth Solidarity Network (YSN) will host a live video-conference with youth in Palestine. Participants will be responding to the media they have engaged with in parallel workshops in Palestine and at the AMC. Both workshops will 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. YSN partners in Palestine proposed this idea so that their young members can see how the digital stories and music they've created during YSN workshops are used and what impact they have.

Presenters: Amy Bach, Heavyn-Leigh American and Habibah Ahmad of Manhattan Neighborhood Network

What is youth-centered participatory action research and how can it be used to advance the field of youth media? Come hear about a collaborative research project that the Manhattan Neighborhood Network's Youth Channel (YC) is doing to involve young people in the development of a cable tv channel dedicated to media made by youth for youth. Called "YC All-City", it will be the nation's first channel to work with teams of young people to shape, produce, and promote youth programming. The workshop will offer participants an opportunity to explore some of the challenges, possibilities, and strategies for supporting organizational work that allows the community to take an active role in the process of research.

Presenters:Shira Hassan, Amber Kutka, Ryanna Sandoval, Cindy Ibarra and Isa Villaflor of The 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…

Presenters: Silva Tingle, Sandra Husic, Precious Cantrell- Jones, Mayra Puma, Jazmine Coates, Cortina Winfrey and Ana Mercado of 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.

A film screening followed by a discussion with members of the Visions To Peace Project, Washington D.C.

In this daring and thoughtful documentary, youth and youth justice workers reveal the many faces of violence against youth. They share personal stories, art and honest dialog with hope of sparking new visions for safety that do not depend on policing and prisons. Vision Is Our Power was created by youth and young adults of the Visions to Peace Project, a youth leadership and movement-building project located in Washington, DC. We are committed to building a broad vision and movement for safety, justice and freedom - the building blocks of peace - through the use of arts, media and community education. Following the screening, members of the Visions to Peace Project will facilitate a discussion and exercises in which participants will work together to create analysis, visions and strategies for ending multiple forms of violence against youth.

Presenters: Aurora Castellanos, Shahidah Lacy, Yianeth Saenz, Phred Swain-Sugarman, Taylor White and Scott Boswell of The 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.

Presenters: Facilitators from the Palestine Education Project; Students from Bushwick Community High School

Using a mixture of demonstration and discussion, this workshop will share the Palestine /Israek Education Project's (PEP) work using media in teaching about about Israel/Palestine. We will explore ways to raise awareness about the Palestinian struggle while developing ways for youth in the US to articulate and address their own connections to colonialism, racism, and militarism. Educators and students will co-facilitate, using Palestinian hip hop videos and lyrics, digital stories made by Palestinian youth in refugee camps, radio and video pieces created by youth in Brooklyn, and clips from the documentary “Slingshot Hip Hop” to jumpstart conversations around racism, occupation, and resistance. This workshop will provide concrete activity suggestions, hand-outs, and audio-visual materials.

Presenters: Andrea Ridges, Jon Blount, Starlet Lee and Jenny Lee of Detroit Summer's Live Arts Media Project; Andrea Ritchie and Remy Kharbanda of Research for Revolution; Isa Gonzalez & Paula Rojas 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!

Presenters: Dulani, Sarah Singh, and Jamila of 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.

Presenters: Gabriel Duncan and Ras K'Dee

In this workshop, the grassroots media group Seventh Native American Generation (SNAG) will discuss the genocide of California Natives beginning with massacres during the Gold Rush of 1849 and continuing with forced removals, boarding schools, reservations and mercury pollution. We will provide accounts shared by SNAG's founder, Ross Cunnningham (a Pomo from Northern California) and through clips from the film "Gold, Greed and Genocide." Afterward SNAG will lead a writing workshop with participants around their experiences with cultural genocide and resistance, modeled after its work with Native youth in schools and on reservations. Some of the writings produced during the workshop will appear in the next issue of SNAG, which is dedicated to the shared struggles of Palestinian and Native youth. You can purchase a copy at the workshop for $5. It comes with a music CD inside of Native artists from across the country.

This year, for the first time, a youth advisory board has designed a day-long youth meet-up and knowledge exchange to kick-off the conference. All of the youth organizations in attendance should prepare a 10 minute mini-workshop that zeros in on one aspect of your work that you think is hot. We'll spend Friday morning sharing our workshops with each other in a swap-meet style exchange of expertise. For more information contact:
Mariana Castañeda (Detroit Summer) marianalocasta@gmail.com
Navi Sandhu (Radio Rootz) nsandhu01@yahoo.com

In the afternoon, we'll get an orientation to all the different stations that will be set up in the media lab (audio, video, photo and transmitter-building). Those of us who want to jump right down to business making media together will do so. Those of us who want to learn more about Detroit, while collecting audio and video footage, will get on the PPH bus and head out to explore the city.

Come see/hear all the work of youth media makers produced throughout the weekend of the AMC!