Quirky Black Girls: INCITE! at the 12th Allied Media Conference!

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INCITE! at the 12th Allied Media Conference!

via INCITE! Blog by inciteblog on 5/19/10

INCITE! and To Tell You the Truth have teamed up to coordinate a track at this year's Allied Media Conference (AMC) from June 18-20 in Detroit, Michigan.

Allied Media Conference 2010!

The AMC brings together people from around the world working for and through "participatory media to transform our selves and our world". More info on the AMC can be found at the conference website and below:

The Allied Media Conference advances our visions for a just and creative world. It is a laboratory for media-based solutions to the matrix of life-threatening problems we face. Since our founding in 1999, we have evolved our definition of media, and the role it can play in our lives – from zines to video-blogging to breakdancing, to communicating solidarity and creating justice. Each conference builds off the previous one and plants the seeds for the next. Ideas and relationships evolve year-round, incorporating new networks of media-makers, technologists and social justice organizers. We draw strength from our converging movements to face the challenges and opportunities of our current moment. We are ready to create, connect and transform.

We are excited to announce the workshop schedule for our track at the conference, which features the work and vision of many members of the INCITE community and beyond:

Make/Shift RecLAmation: Performing New Feminisms
Presenters: Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia, Hilary Goldberg, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jessica Hoffmann, Jessica Lawless, and more, TBA.
From local co-ops to transnational organizations, contemporary feminist activism is shifting understandings of the old slogan "the personal is political." Faced with not only gender-based oppression but also the structural violences of a collapsing capitalism, a climate crisis, and more, feminist activists and artists are resisting and creating alternatives to oppressive systems both intimate and global. And they're doing it in many ways, spaces, and forms. "Makeshift Reclamation," a multimedia, multivoiced performance, offers a glimpse of what is happening on the ground and in the imaginations of social-justice-minded feminists. The program centers around two projects: recLAmation, a film by Hilary Goldberg, and make/shift, an independent magazine featuring the art and activism of queer and antiracist feminists from around the world. "Makeshift Reclamation" features film with live narration, readings, and video/audio works that movingly articulate a feminism that is as concerned with prisons and policing, queer politics, immigration raids, and colonialism as it is with traditional feminist issues like domestic violence.

M/others, Mamaz and Community Care-givers Unite Through Truth-telling!  
Facilitator: tk karakashian tunchez, To tell You the Truth/ New Mythos Project
M/others (self-identified single, teen and welfare mamaz), Mamaz and community caregivers around the country are telling their truths through zines, blogs, printed media, performance work etc, and using this process of truth-telling to create stronger selves, families and communities. In this 3-part, interactive workshop, we will share practical skills and organizing models, then strategize on how we can support each other year-round through a national network of mamaz and community caregivers. Come share your questions and your knowledge with us!  

Part one: Knowledge Fair- showcasing some of the many incredible projects in the room, including: Gia Hamilton- The Gris Gris Lab (NOLA), tk karakashian tunchez- founder of To tell You the Truth/ New Mythos Project (W. Mass.), the WelfareQUEENS (San Fransisco, CA), Rachel Caballero- Radio Pirateer & founding member of La Semilla Childcare Collective (Austin, TX), China Martens- Mama/Zinester & Radical Childcare Collective member- Future Generation & Don't Leave Your Friends Behind, Kidz Space (Baltimore, MD), Katina Parker- Social Media Specialist and founder New Orleans Labor of Love- (Durham, NC), Noemi Martinez- Blogger and Zinester- founder of Hermana, Resist (Tx), Maegan "la Mamita Mala" Ortiz- Blogger- Vivir Latino, Dos Mujeres Media (Queens, NY).

 Part two: Skill Share- giving you a chance to learn some of the specific truth-telling and organizing techniques, including: zine making, optimizing on social media use, on-the-go-video-how-to, blogging 101, building a radical childcare collective.

Part three: strategy session- Here's the chance for all us m/other, mamaz & community cargegivers in the room to think, dream, strategize, and envision specific ways we can work together over the next year. We will explore questions like; What do we bring to the tables as mamaz? What support do we need? How can we fortify our national community and our families? How can alternative media-making further our movements and transformations?

This session prioritizes the participation of mothers and community care-givers of color, but is open to all.

INCITE! Gender Justice Caucus
Facilitators: Karla Chueh-Mejia and Ned del Callejo
The INCITE! Gender Justice Caucus is committed to expanding the online & offline network of organized spaces that are challenging gender-policing & transphobia, sharing of popular education tools, and how to move forward with building women of color spaces that go beyond the binary system. We are working to develop a broader understanding of what gender justice means and how it intersects with our gender, race, and class. Our goal is to create a national online space & communication infrastructure to explore the continuum or spectrum of fluid gendered states along with dealing with the oppressive social constructs. This space is for women, gender-non conforming people, and transpeople of color who are currently part of or interested in the INCITE! network.

"The Way We Move: Embodying Resistance Dance Workshop"
Presenters: Althea Baird and Misia Dinéa
The prospect of a revolution is futile if we as agents of change do not incorporate modes of healing and preventing "burn-out" into our daily lives. From Capoeira to Gumboot Jigging to B-Boying/B-Girling to Contact Improvisation, movement and dance have always been revolutionary acts: connecting us to our bodies, telling our stories, healing our scars, and accompanying our movements for liberation. In this workshop we will embrace the use of movement and story to get back into our own bodies and explore rituals and practices that prepare and sustain us, both for the day-to-day grind and for our collective struggles for justice. We will focus on centering, stretching, collaborative movements, creating movement phrases, and lastly, exploring life practices for holistic health. The pieces created in this workshop can then be shared in an optional performance during the closing session of the conference.

INCITE! Builds a Drupal Website
Facilitators: INCITE! Media & Communications Working Group
INCITE Women of Color Against Violence invites Drupal web developers from within the AMC community to assist them in the development of a participatory, open-source, website that will strengthen the communications infrastructure of our network of chapters, affiliates and individuals. Just as Audre Lorde knew that, "the masters tools will never dismantle the master's house," we know that we cannot rely on proprietary technology to liberate our communities. Nor can we look to an open source vanguard to build our communications infrastructure for us. We need to do it ourselves. We invite any technologists, experienced in Drupal code, and committed to supporting women, trans and gender non-conforming people of color leadership in technology to join attend this caucus. Together, we will map out a year of skill-sharing and co-creating, that will result in the baddest, interactive, open-source online community of people working to end violence against our communities, that has ever existed. Because we want this to be a very intentional and productive conversation, we ask that you RSVP to: jennylx@gmail.com if you are interested in attending.

The Azolla Story: Queer/trans people of color with disabilities meetup and zine making session!
Facilitator: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Do you dream of a political community by and for queer/trans POC disabled folks? Let's make it happen! Are you scared to call yourself disabled or chronically ill cause feel like you've got enough on your plate as a QTPOC? Is disability at the center of your identity, work and life? Are you somewhere in between, figuring it out? Come hang with our queer/trans of color fierce crips and talk story, share dreams and visions, and move beyond survival to fighting for a disability justice movement that places our queer brown disabled stories at the center of our work. This is a caucus space to build with each other and also space to make a queer/trans of color disabled/ zine about our experiences to use as an organizing, healing and resiliency tool at the AMC, the USSF and all our communities.

Representations of Women of Color in Neo-Burlesque
Presenter: Xandra Ibarra
This popular education workshop will be led by performance artist and ecdysiast, Xandra Ibarra, founder of Kaleidoscope–An Annual National People of Color Cabaret. The first half of the workshop will discuss historical/colonial ties to current images of women of color in neo-burlesque. This workshop will view historical and contemporary video, photography, and magazine literature to understand how certain representations have reinforced colonial imagery and narratives about women of color. Since, neo-burlesque should not be seen solely in terms of victimization for women of color, the second part of this workshop will be fun and sexy; learn to take off your gloves like the pros! Queer, trans, and women of color encouraged to attend. For more info: www.lachicaboom.com and www.kaleidoscopecabaret.com.

Health is Dignity and Dignity is Resistance: Online and Offline Organizing for Healing Justice
Presenters: CureThis.org, the Rockdove Collective, Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collaborative, JAZZ for Health/Casa de Salud, To Tell You the Truth, and the Community Acupuncture Network.
"Health is dignity and dignity is resistance." This quote by a healer in Chiapas, Mexico, reveals the joined struggles of organizing, health, liberation, and healing. In the United States, communities are strengthening existing health justice movements and creating new models of sustainable healing, healthcare, and collective liberation – both online and offline. Presenters will share healing justice models – of varying scales – with the goal of inspiring and engaging participants in a strategy session. The session aims to 1) to stimulate discussion around innovative healing and health/care practices in communities around the country; to 2) inspire participants to share stories and visions of online organizing around healing justice; and to 3) foster strategies to strengthen participatory online infrastructures to support these offline models.

About To Tell You The Truth:

To tell you the Truth combines Media Literacy, Multi-Media Production and Truth Telling as we work together toward healing and liberation through beauty. In the past year To tell you the Truth's work has included working with mamaz, community caregivers and femmez to begin to create and vision some projects that will support our truth-telling and liberation!

The New Mythos Tour is also a project of To Tell You The Truth, and is directly connected to the track at the AMC, bringing m/others and community caregivers together in a national network through a U.S.-wide multi-media tour.

For more information about the INCITE/To Tell You The Truth track and the rest of the workshops at the Allied Media Conference, check out: http://alliedmediaconference.org/program/tracks.

Filed under: Events, INCITE! Announcements Tagged: art, community organizing, conference, media