Cyberquilting: Women of Color Stitching Together a New Media Movement
The Cyberquilting Experiment: A Network of Women of Color Stitching Movements Together in Web 2.0 and Beyond
Type of Session: Interactive panel
Short Description: (100-150 words).
The Cyberquilting Experiment examines how Web 2.0 and various Social Medias can be used as a resource for social justice work and movement building activities. As with the Highlander Folk School in the US Civil Rights Movement, the cyberquilting experiment is to be a space where activism, cognitive engagement, and skill development intersect, equipping women of color activist and organizations with the cyber tools needed to bring about radical social change. Our long-term goal is to build a feminist of color owned and operated autonomous web structure that allows women to plug in and reach out to each other and share resources in a secure environment through various cyber mediums. This workshop features a Cyberquilting Skill Share Model where youth, elders (intergenerational), organizers, and community groups will work together to show how various internet technologies as well as traditional forms of mobilization/protest can strengthen current and future social justice work.
AGENDA/Purpose
Outreach: We see this session as part of the INCITE! track that can help fulfill the purposes of:
1. Continuing the conversation between woc community organizers (incite!) and media makers (speak) to build on the collective definition of radical women of color media (what it is and what its for: see a visual representation here: http://www.alliedmediaconference.org/node/2132)
2. Session where INCITE! media justice task force, Speak, Cyberquilting, and other woc centered online media can strategize on building and using an internet presence together
3. an example of using art/media/technology for international communication and building solidarity and community across geographic distance
Therefore we hope that women of color media makers of all kinds will attend in order to build strategic partnership and bonds of love! :)
Using a discussion and interactive format with YouTube presentation, we will:
5 minutes:
Briefly introduce ourselves, welcome everyone to the session, give detail(s) about cyberquilting, and a brief timeline for the session.
Collective Presenter:
The Cyber Quilting Experiment is a project examining how the internet can be used as a resource for social justice work and movement building activities.
Cyberquilting is responding to the needs of women of color both the new and old realities that are affecting their lives: (1) Women of Color and the constant threat of Violence; (2) Stretched Resources and Organizing: (3) Information and Communications Technology; and (4) The Need to Connect.
Cyberquilting is a way to share your own visionary work and to connect to the work of other groups and individuals by stitching movement together. We are the thread!
For example: Are you interested in organizing to end violence against women of color? Creating new media that portrays women of color in a new light? Strategizing for deeper relationships among neighbors in your community? Pick an area of cyber quilting that moves you and get moving.
Others presenters will interject wherever needed or feels moved. Cyberquilter Mai'a Williams of Guerilla Mama Medicine will skype in from Egypt.
TIMELINE
25 minutes:
* Show a portion of the Be Bold Be Red video (to give participants a real sense of the kind of work we are developing)
* Discuss: ideally we would like other cyberquilters in the room (webcamed in) to give participants the full effect of how we can connect
20 minutes:
ACTIVITY: Different color patches will be placed on each seat, on the back of those patches will be an art pieces that they will stitch together at the end. There will be four to six different color patches. Each color will become a group. The groups should remain smaller and more intimate.
* Pose questions they should answer and discuss among themselves (we’ll have the questions written somewhere for them to look back on).
1. What comes to mind when you think of stitching – movements – together
2. What type of social justice work are you involved in, write down in one sentence
3. Write three resources you or your orgs have access to (i.e.: skills, materials, non-material, inspiration, art – anything)
4. One pressing need attached to what you do.
15 minutes:
We will ask for volunteers to answer the questions and _____will write them on the board or big sheets of paper, so we can begin to stitch and connect movements/people together.
* Start to grasp how all their work is connected, see if they can group resources.
* How would know where to go to meet those needs and actually pool resources?
* If we didn’t have this room structure, how would we come together? Creating infrastructure for movement building – immediate sense.
10 minutes:
Stitching the quilt together
10 minutes:
Final: End with the most pressing thing to talk about.
_____ will pass out questionnaire asking, what is the most pressing topic to discuss. _____ will quickly pool that one question together.
1. Can we build community through the internet?
2. Security and the internet – can we talk about the things we need to fully utilize the internet
3. Intergenerational and Technology
Focuses:
We are not trying to be another organization, creating connections, being the resource for people's work everyday
What quilting means, why do people do it, what are the feelings and the sense of it?
Create an infrastructure that allows for pooling resources, communication with each other, to “fully” do the work you’re already doing.
How we use the resources (even bare minimum) that we do have creatively and collectively? Discuss creative ways, so you don’t have a laptop, you don’t have a webcam, what now?
Rethink how we think about resources. Dispel myth and fears that you can’t create community through the internet. Interconnected globally.
We create the infrastructure, you do the work, we show that you’re not isolated. We’re the thread.
5 minutes:
Q & A
Have a flyer in the back participants can take with them as they leave.
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bios:
Adele Nieves is a freelance journalist and media-maker. She is a member of the editorial collective Critical Moment, a newsprint magazine working to provide a forum for education, debate, and dialogue around the political issues affecting communities in the Southeast Michigan area andSPEAK! Radical Women of Color Media Collective, a net-roots coalition of women of color bloggers and media-makers. In 2007, she launched Liquid Words Productions; an independent production company/music studio.
Alexis is the founder of BrokenBeautifulPress.com. BBP is an interactive creation space based on the principle that freedom is free because time, love and energy are resources that we create together. BBP has also implemented black feminist web education programs, “Summer of Our Lorde" and "The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.”
Fallon is a PhD student in the Social Service Administration School at the University of Chicago. On October 31, 2007, Fallon organized an online grassroots movement in response to violence against women of color called the Be Bold Be Red movement.
Moya is a PhD student at Emory University. While at Spelman was President of the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance (FMLA) during the famous Nelly Protest. Moya is the founder of the web niche community, Quirky Black Girls.
Zachari was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to study the impact of women on Baile Funk, a contemporary Brazilian musical form immediately upon her graduation from Duke University's department of cultural anthropology.
Presenters: Fallon Wilson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Moya Bailey, Adele Nieves, Zachari Curtis
The Cyberquilting Experiment examines how social medias can be used as a resource for movement building activities, to create spaces where activism, cognitive engagement, and skill development intersect and equip women of color activists and organizations with the cyber tools needed to bring about radical social change. The Cyberquilting concept draws on the tradition of quilting as a radical media practice of oppressed communities in the United States. Enslaved women in the US used quilts not only as artistic interventions and resources to provide warmth to their families, but also as tactile histories, teaching tools, and vessels for hidden messages about the possibility of freedom. This workshop features interactive discussions and demonstrations on how various internet technologies as well as traditional forms of mobilization/protest can strengthen current and future social justice work. The questions we will explore are: how do you build community on the web; how safe is the internet for women of color and women of color organizers; and is the internet only for younger generations of activist?
