June 25, 2007

Allied Media Conference -- Day 1 Blog

Posted by Elijah Barrett-Aviles at 2:51AM

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I'm blogging from the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, Mich., this weekend, a meeting of radical/alternative media makers from across the country. On the bus ride to the conference, we passed by miles of strip malls and through streets that were part withering industrial landscape and part abandoned and boarded up storefronts and apartment buildings.

This landscape is part of the bad rap that Detroit gets from outsiders. The Motor City's story, especially since the dramatic decline of its auto industry, was important today because it was a lens through which the presenters in the workshops and symposia made us examine the question of popular education at home and abroad. Detroit struggles more with issues like literacy, health, transportation, segregation, and inequality than other cities. Its activists, in response, are also among the toughest.

Why look at popular education on the first day of the conference, instead of cutting straight to strategies toward better alternative-radical-independent media? I can't help but draw parallels between the two.

One reason, perhaps, lies in one of the central tenants of popular education. The first workshop I went to, led by University of Michigan professor Scott Kurashige, stressed that effective popular education builds on the knowledge that people already have. Likewise, an effective news article should be in a language, tone, and register that its target audience will understand, and will not feel excluded by.

Or, take the freestyle workshop I went to later that day. The presenter Davin Thompson, a hip-hop artist and instructor from Oakland, Calif., drew a small black dot on the whiteboard and asked us to describe it. A dot, a black hole, a coffee bean, a bullet hole. His point was that hip-hop artists feel pressured by the music industry to describe and interpret their art (in this case, the dot) with one approach or description instead of many. The message is that similarly radical and independent journalists must resist the pressure to tackle social issues in just one way, and instead look for the multiple ways to ask about and examine an issue.

I'm still reeling from a workshop earlier that day when the topic went from popular education and literacy to an explosive brainstorm of how to improve Detroit's education system. Part of me was frustrated to hear from Detroit residents and activists the disaster that the public school system has become in recent years. Another part was inspired by organizers like Elena Herrada of El Centro Obrero de Detroit and the students of Detroit Summer who still had hope and ideas for public education in Detroit. I'm still trying to sort through that workshop, but in the short-term, I value the chance to hear from people who face daunting injustices daily in a city that is in many ways one of America's most desperate and in need of community action.

The day ended with a meeting of zine librarians and writers at a local coffee shop. One woman suggested that zine writers become their own archivist, keeping the zines they make as part library, part portfolio. Some others mentioned the new online zine archives such as QZAP out of Minneapolis. As many influential independent magazines have gone under in the last year - such as Punk Planet and Clamor - a conversation about "back to basics" low-cost DIY publishing fits right in at the end of a long-day of conversations about popular, accessible knowledge and information.

Tomorrow, the conference officially starts with workshops and plenary on alternative media. I'm definitely looking forward to reporting back.