UBC Anthropology faculty and students are presenting at the following venues:
November 4: Dr. Charles Menzies "Our Grandmothers' Garden: Participatory Film in Gitxaala Nation," 12 – 1.30 pm at 310 – 2125 Main Mall, Scarfe Building. Dr. Menzies talk is part of UBC's Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education speakers series.
Abstract: Digitally recording our lives has become ubiquitous. The family albums of a few short decades ago have morphed into kilobytes of data in a myriad of types of storage mediums. Videos are posted to Youtube and then shared through social utilities like Facebook or Bebo; photos are uploaded onto sites like Flicker or Snapfish or Picasa and then shared within families, friends, or strangers with common interests. All of these visual mediums are complemented –perhaps complicated? - by the proliferation of blogs and webpages that salt commentary with image and sound. This is the context for visual anthropology today whether one is working in the urban centres or along the margins of late capitalist society. This paper examines the place of collaborative video research through the lens of a decade long research programme of cooperation between UBC and Gitxaala Nation on the north coast of British Columbia. Our Grandmothers’ Garden is an example of combining research, film, and community practice that produces formal documentaries and informal Web 2.0 products.