The Pedagogy of Digital Storytelling in the College Classroom

In the fall of 2008, Rachel Raimist and Walter Jacobs collaboratively designed and taught the course “Digital Storytelling in and with Communities of Color” to 18 undergraduate students from a variety of disciplines. Candance Doerr-Stevens audited the class as a graduate student. This article examines the media making processes of the students in the course, asking how participants used digital storytelling to engage with themselves and the media through content creation that both mimicked and critiqued current media messages. In particular, students used the medium of digital storytelling to build and revise identities for purposes of rememory, reinvention, and cultural remixing. We provide a detailed online account of the digital stories and composing processes of the students through the same multimedia genre that the students were asked to use, that of digital storytelling

The influence of social media and other modes of communication before and after the Tuscaloosa Tornado

The April 27th 2011 EF-4 Tuscaloosa, AL tornado forever changed the city, passing within 1 kilometer of the University of Alabama. The majority of the campus community had experience under tornado warnings, but had not experienced a tornado of this intensity. This research focuses on assessing the influence of social media (Facebook and Twitter) and other types of communication before and after the tornado for the University of Alabama campus community. Over 2,300 surveys were completed online by the students, staff, and faculty. Participants were asked questions concerning their demographic background, shelter seeking impetus, and preferred primary source of communication. To address the influence of these types of hazard communication four objectives were formulated. The four objectives for this study included: 1) who used social media before and after the tornado, 2) how was social media used before and after, 3) did social media usage influence shelter-seeking behavior, and 4) did social media usage differ between the campus and city populations. With the uniqueness of this event, many individuals relied on Facebook and Twitter for weather updates and recovery information. Not only for the campus population, but the city population also saw an increase usage, especially with Facebook. The usage of these sites among the diverse population at UA and the city of Tuscaloosa could potentially shape how weather information is disseminated and how communities prepare and react during severe weather. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Integration and transformation: an examination of the role of sexuality in formulating a queer/crip subjectivity for people with disabilities

This thesis investigates the current cultural discourses surrounding sexuality in persons with disabilities and argues that in order to move away from existing conceptions of personhood and citizenship that are rooted in ableism and are thus possibilities only for nondisabled persons, persons with disabilities and their nondisabled allies must embrace the queer potential advocated by crip theorists, who have so usefully applied the insights of queer theorists to the field of disability studies. I will begin by interrogating the relationship of disability studies and feminist theory by examining the societal/cultural construction of normative bodies. Next, I will focus on how notions of citizenship and who constitutes "proper" or "acceptable" political actors are rooted in ideologies of ability, ideologies which are themselves often predicated on the assumption of "normal" sexual functioning, among other normative assumptions. Then I will explore the historical policing of the sexuality of disabled persons and argue that access to sexual knowledge and expression is crucial to helping disabled persons create positive self-identities and a sense of themselves as subjects. Finally, I will conduct a critical reading of these issues on the television show Glee, which exemplifies the failings of the existing cultural models of disability and sexuality but also provides examples of the power and promise of a queer crip subjectivity, and briefly compare Glee to other televisual representations of disabled sexuality. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

The other collectives of the left: reading Black left feminisms in sites of transatlantic cultural praxis

Paul Gilroy writes, "It would appear that there are large questions raised about the direction and character of Black culture and art if we take the powerful effects of even temporary experiences of exile, relocation, and displacement into account" (Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 18). Transnationality and citizenship are tangled discourses, acted out in real time, on real people, effecting not only the exiled, relocated, and displaced as individuals, but the communal relations they leave, enter, and/or produce. In this research, grounded in issues of collective cultural praxis, I examine the relationship between lived experience, mechanizations of power, and how collectivity -in the formation of community action groups and artists collectives. I argue that in this way cultural production is instrumental in the transgressing of the real and imaged borders of race, nation, gender, and class. I look at the cultural work of Afro-Caribbean, and American exile, Claudia Jones, American Lorraine Hansberry, and Black artist collectives working in and between the U.S. and U.K. My central argument is that by looking at the work of Black radicals, specifically Black left feminists and their strategic use of collaborative cultural practice, we can deepen our understanding of the strategic use of cultural in bringing about social change. I also argue for a rethinking of the histories and representations of Black radicalism, and the re-imagining of the Black radical subject. This new historicization of the Black radicalism - which is inclusive of leftist feminisms, transnational subjectivity, cultural workers and artists - pushes us toward a radical revision of cultural and identity politics. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

"What don't Black girls do?": constructions of deviance and the performance of Black female sexuality

This research interrogates the ways in which Black women process and negotiate their sexual identities. By connecting the historical exploitation of Black female bodies to the way Black female deviant identities are manufactured and consumed currently, I was able to show not only the evolution of Black women's attitudes towards sexuality, but also the ways in which these attitudes manifest when policing deviancy amongst each other. Chapter 1 gives historical insight to the way that deviancy has been inextricably linked to the construction of Blackness. Using the Post-Reconstruction Era as my point of entry, I demonstrate the ways in which Black bodies were stigmatized as sexually deviant, and how the use of Black caricatures buttressed the consumption of this narrative by whites. I explain how countering this narrative became fundamental to the evolution of Black female sexual politics, and how ultimately bodily agency was later restored through sexual deviancy. Chapter 2 interrogates the way "authenticity" is propagated within the genre of reality TV. Black women are expected to perform deviant identities that coincide with controlling images so that the "authenticity" of Black womanhood is consumed by mainstream audiences. Using Vh1's Love and Hip Hop Atlanta and Basketball Wives I analyze the way these identities are performed and policed by the women on both shows. Lastly, Chapter 3 is a reflexive analysis detailing the ways in which Black women process the performances of deviant Black female identities on reality TV using ethnographic methods. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries