|
Abstracts of papers selected by the Academic Committee to be presented in the seventh edition of the Summer Conference
|
|
Exhibition: Two Worlds: Selections from the Borderland Youth Project Jason Reed Department of Photography, and Ryan Sprott Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies University of Texas
Photo by Victoria Marquez, Big Lake, Texas Two
Worlds functions as a catalyst for an inclusive discourse on the idea of
personal and collective identity in an increasingly flat world. Asking
essential questions about where we come from, who we are, how we relate,
how we live, and what we might become, the work challenges us to look at
ourselves and deeply contemplate our own location in a rapidly changing
world. The discussion presented by this exhibition is unique however, as
the work comes from a participatory collaboration between young people
and professional artists. This collaborative creativity has allowed for
a shift away from the hierarchies intrinsic to modernist art practice
and towards a contemporary social model that strives to gain its
conceptual and aesthetic strength not from the singular actions of one,
but rather the collective agency of many. The
text and photographs in this exhibition represent a small selection from
a larger body of work completed in collaborative programs between
professional artists (working for Borderland Youth at Texas State
University) and young people in four communities across the Texas
borderland region and Native American lands of New Mexico. And although
the project was conducted within a region often narrowly defined by its
Southwestern culture and heritage, we were able to work with a diverse
group of young people with Native American, Latino, Anglo, and Filipino
backgrounds as well as a large group of refugee youth from such
countries as Sudan, Burma, Tanzania, and Thailand. This intriguing
mixture of races, ethnicities, and life experiences was not a result of
a necessarily concerted effort on our part, but rather the fact that
these young people are representative of the global community that is at
the core of contemporary life. The
process of collaboration we applied was based both on a specific
conceptual framework that sought to explore certain consistent ideas
throughout all of the programs as well as an organic, intuitive model of
creation that allowed both the working methods and the end-products to
be determined by our particular relationship with each group of young
people. In each instance we approached the youth with the proposal to
collectively explore ideas of self, family, and culture. We spent
considerable time talking with the young people in both group and
individual settings, as we jointly encountered the difficulties inherent
with an introspective look at one’s own identity. We then facilitated
the exploration of these ideas through photography and creative writing.
We see the entire process as a collective conversation amongst us
all—a reciprocal dialogue where authorial roles are ceded, narrative
power is shifted away from traditional, hegemonic models through access,
prospect, and collaboration, and a conceptual point of departure is
established for complex questions about community, ethnicity, religion,
storytelling, identity, and culture. About Jason Reed Jason Reed is currently Assistant Professor, Photography at Texas State University. He holds an MFA in Photography from Illinois State University and BA in Geography from the University of Texas-Austin. His personal photographic work explores the cultural landscape of the places he has called home (Texas, New Mexico, and Illinois). Particularly he is interested in how people create space for themselves, mark the land, and find comfort and value in the architecture of their daily lives. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, St. Edwards University in Austin, and this summer at the UTSA Satellite Space in San Antonio. Currently he is collaborating with refugee youth in San Antonio on a social art project that will be shown at Artpace in December. In addition he runs Borderland Youth at Texas State University About Ryan Sprott Ryan Sprott is a research assistant and doctoral student in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He holds a MA in Curriculum and Instruction from Angelo State University and a BA in Spanish and English from Texas State University – San Marcos. He has taught social studies, language arts, and mathematics in Latin America and in West Texas. His research interests include language arts instruction, participatory action research, and the spatial translations of policy and practice. Currently, as the field director of Borderland Youth, he is working on a participatory art project with students and families who are recent refugees living in Texas. About the
Borderland Youth project Borderland
Youth at Texas State University is a social art project that works
collaboratively with communities of youth living in the US/Mexico border
region to creatively reflect upon the cross-cultural, human experiences
existent within this significant social geography. By utilizing
participatory art practices we are able to create a public body of work
that functions as a tangible mechanism to activate social awareness and
provide access to a more realistic, complex, and complete story of the
US/Mexico border and its residents while adding a rich new layer of
personal, familial and cultural stories and perspectives to the
collective archive of American life.
|
return to
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| » Secciones Tematicas en Enkidu | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Summer Conference: 
