Follow the River: City Regeneration in Tension as Works of Water

Received 14 July 2021. Accepted 20 May 2022. Published online 11 July 2022.The article looks at some examples of the urban regeneration strategies and initiatives in Medellín, Colombia. Being part of the process of regeneration of the country after the decades of the armed conflict the initiatives transform the city at least by creating the discourse that facilitates the social change in the city. The ontological proposal of feminist more-than-humanism focusing on materiality of water, particularly its rhizomatic connectivity, allows rethinking the concept of the city and its regeneration as generation of the inclusive space that provides habitat and life for anyone who wants to live in, around, through, and with the city. The revised initiatives are symbolically divided into two groups: water plans of connection-fragmentation policy and traces of water—mostly grassroots connectivity in response to the dominating power structures. They are not uniform groups and are the products/processes of tension between opposite tendencies. Creative tension is works of water. Water looks at limitations as at the opportunity to create the new. Its regeneration is not re- but generation of the inclusive habitat that provides life for anyone who wants to live in, around, through, and with the city

Video Composition as Multimodal Writing: Rethinking the Essay as Post-Literacy

This essay describes an academic experience that both authors shared during a research visit to Russia in November 2018. The goal of this experience was to introduce participants (students and professors) to the notion of multimodal writing as an alternative to how we create texts in class. The essay first contextualizes the idea of “post-literacy” as part of a worldwide move to rethink literacy,  especially in this century. The essay then conceptualizes the notion of multimodality as a feature of these “post-literacies” and contextualizes this concept within the practical experience as both authors undertook in a masterclass at a Russian institution. For the masterclass, the authors asked everybody to make videos using only one smartphone and any other resources they had right beside them. After sharing what the activity was about and what attendants did, the authors provide a final moment of reflexivity for others who may want to consider implementing multimodal texts in their classrooms. Keywords: Post-literacy, multimodality, design, video essays, text creatio