AMC2011 Tracks
Tracks are series of workshop sessions connected by shared strategies, issues or identities. Less like “railroad tracks” that would route your interest in a particular direction, tracks at the AMC are more like “animal tracks” that crisscross each other as they travel in unexpected patterns.
MEDIA IN OUR BODIES: DANCE & PERFORMANCE ARTS
The way we move our bodies is a form of media. It can be transformative and participatory. It can document, subvert and protect. The AMC community has demonstrated this through past sessions such as: Breakdancing, Embodying Resistance, Decolonial Images in Burlesque, Comedy as a Subversive Tool, Homorobics, plus our epic late-night dance parties. This track is for people who want to geek-out on the potential for dance and performance arts to heal and inspire our communities. We want to make movement accessible to all ages and bodies. We will be working to make the AMC afterparties as youth-friendly, queer-friendly and all-body friendly as possible. This track will be starting point for movement enthusiasts who want to grow a network of support and collaboration that extends beyond the AMC.
KIDS TRANSFORM THE WORLD!
Kids four and up will take a magical journey where they engage with each other, imaginary characters and the stars and constellations of the AMC Galaxy. From our families to our homes, our communities to our earth, kids will explore their stories, dream up infinite possibilities, and express their visions for the world through paper, through voice, through play and beyond.
¡LOS NIÑOS TRANSFORMAN EL MUNDO!
MEDIA POLICY FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE
"What does media policy have to do with me? This track will demystify and breakdown the local and federal media policies that have a profound impact on our ability to communicate and organize as cultural workers, artists, movement-builders, and community members. What do people-centered media policies look like? How can we shape our local communication infrastructures to create greater access, participation and community ownership? Sessions will provide resources, case studies, strategies, media policy literacy curricula and popular education tools for participants to bring back to their local communities. The track will highlight timely media policies, such as access to an open Internet, broadband adoption, consumer protections for wireless users, criminal charges on prison calls, privacy and security issues. It will share cutting edge grassroots strategies for transforming these policies from the ground up!
ELDERS: AMPLIFYING GENERATIONS OF BRILLIANCE
Building on the wild and inspiring success of the Allied Media Conference Youth Track, the Elders track is designed to activate the rootedness of our movement in generations of brilliance, experimentalism and bravery. This track will be a space for sharing intergenerational and elder-led initiatives in marginalized and oppressed communities. We will build infrastructure for the practice of intergenerational communication, story-sharing, listening, love and support. We believe in cultivating "eldership," which is more an age demographic. Eldership is a self-identification and orientation. Individual elders and groups of elders take on the calling of framing the era, providing mentorship, carrying traditions, and embracing community with their catalytic experiential wisdom. The practice of eldership honors elders as priceless oracles in the time-traveling, shape-shifting work of holistic transformation.
GROWING SAFER COMMUNITIES
Putting Transformative Justice at center stage, this dynamic track is chock full of communication strategies, tools and dreams for anyone working to build safety from violence and abuse in their communities without using the police or criminal legal system! Building on last year's successful Creating Safer Communities track, this year we'll take conversations about transformative justice and community-based accountability to the next level. Our communities are using tools like zines, safetylabs, flip cam videos, and neighborhood safety mapping to support a safe, healing, and restorative world. We're tapping into into potlucks, posters, story circles, weekend action camps, elder/ youth inter-generational conversations, Twitter, textmobs, stencils and oh so much more to grow these communities. This track will bring together collectives from across North America and beyond to explore the brilliant ways we're (nonviolently) kicking butt and building the systems we need to be safe and free.
POETRY & MUSIC AS TRANSFORMATIVE MEDIA
This track will be a gathering point for artists, organizers, and educators seeking to create community and center the potential of music and poetry to transform ourselves and our world. Applying the same forms of creativity and critique that we use in creating art to our methods of organizing, we hope to reflect on our work in holistic and innovative ways. We will share economic models for working artists to make their work financially sustainable and explore how those models can intersect with movement building. We will build and strengthen networks of performing arts and literary arts organizations that utilize poetry and music to engage youth in arts education, politicization, and leadership development. Throughout the track we will focus on ways to integrate cooperative and collaborative values into our organizing practices and artistic production. And of course we will create and share art that transforms and inspires us!
INCITE!
The INCITE! Track at the AMC is a place to build a shared approach to ending violence against trans and cis women, non-binary and trans* people of color through diverse media – from blogging and graphic design to zine-making and textile design. We will continue to highlight the transformative media strategies that will help broaden the understanding of gender justice and integrating this politic into our work at the intersections of gender, colonization, race, and class. Through this year's track we will continue to build solidarity between movements, organizations and individuals that are headed by and supported by women, gender non-conforming, and transpeople of color. We will initiate collaborative projects that use different forms of media to help build communication, provide resources and tools to build sustainable ways of organizing and healing. INCITE! Media Working Group will continue to convene strategy sessions to develop the internal and external communications infrastructure of the INCITE! Network, including a partnership with PixelPowrrr in Toronto. Trans women welcome!
DISABILITY JUSTICE: CREATING WHOLENESS
We are committed to building communication strategies for leadership and empowerment among disabled people, this year especially focusing on rural queer youth of color, and to envision creating spaces where we can be our whole selves. We are dreaming spaces where we don't have to separate our gender from our disability from our economic status from our sexuality from any of our other identities - where our struggle for liberation is interconnected. We are looking at ways to use media, technology, and education to expand accessibility and create inclusive spaces for all identities. By incorporating a disability analysis, the AMP family can make space for broader conversations around inclusion, relationships, community building, and self care, and the connection between bodies and exploitation in media. We believe that work around interweaving our various identities is important, not just to the disability movement but to the social justice movement as a whole.
ECO-MEDIA FOR SURVIVAL & SUSTAINABILITY
How does your current relationship to all life on the planet impact your vision(s) for the future? Eco-Media for Survival & Sustainability presents “big picture” storytelling: creating a new world by transforming our relationships with each other and Mother Earth. Designed and led by people of color, our growing network includes youth digital media makers, eco-justice activists, metaphysical manifestors, natural healers, grease car drivers, and off-grid survivors. Highlighting intersections between seemingly unrelated strategies, this track empowers everyone at AMC2011 to build together long term toward just and tangible solutions. Connecting the dots between healthy communities and whole people; energy, food, and housing sovereignty; globalization, prisons, and pollution; and, personal accountability, green privilege, and the eco-footprint of our technological tools, this track demonstrates how bio-fuels, farming/urban gardening, green building, and zero waste events management can be incorporated into multi-media making efforts on every level.
TRANS & QUEER YOUTH MEDIA
LGBTQ young people are using digital storytelling, participatory action research, community mapping, and performance and documentary film as tools for healing, education and community organizing. This track will highlight this liberatory work and strengthen the skills and networks among youth organizers. This track also creates an opportunity for projects and individuals to share models of how to do base building, leadership development, campaign development etc. that are truly youth led. At AMC2011 we will illuminate the generations old traditions of dance, art, drag, storytelling and community love that LGBTQ youth create throughout the country. This track shows how Trans & Queer youth transform from being victim to survivor, activist to revolutionary.
LET'S BUILD IT TOGETHER! COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGY DESIGN
The Collaborative Technology Design Track is a laboratory for applying the Allied Media network's successful participatory media practices to the design of the media tools themselves. It's about getting our devices, software and networks right by designing them together. Each of us has knowledge to offer; by learning to build as a community and connect our diverse skills, we can make technology that works for everyone. These workshops are for people with any level of technical or community experience who want to try collaborative design. How can we make community the core of our design process? We'll get our hands dirty, experiment with new ways of teaching and learning, make mistakes, and try to build wonderful things. This track believes that technology design requires love, inclusiveness, and interdependence. Our goal is to explore ways for entire communities to participate in building complicated stuff.
MEDIOS CAMINANTES: IMMIGRANT VOICES
Focused on building a Spanish-language community media network, this track promotes the exchange of resources and organizing models amongst Spanish-speaking media-organizers and creators. We are also working to create a network of solidarity between immigrants in the US and social movements in Latin America. Through the development of a Medios Caminantes website we will create, exchange, and distribute Spanish-language media for radio, TV and print publications in the US and Latin America. After the passage of SB1070 in Arizona, we have seen a strong movement to denounce racist policies and practices all over the US. Help us to uproot racism and build our strength together as communities! Broadcast your voice to share your story, express your culture, denounce abuses, and create safer and healthier communities! Come to share, learn and exchange strategies to stand up for your rights as an immigrant through art, media, poetry and music!
Enfocados en la construcción de una red de medios comunitarios en español, este panel promueve el intercambio de recursos y modelos organizativos entre comunidades de hispano hablantes, organizadores y creadores de medios independientes. Medios Caminantes está trabajando para la creación de solidaridad entre inmigrantes residentes en los Estados Unidos y comunidades en America Latina. Para apoyar este tipo de solidaridad estamos trabajando en el desarrollo de un portal de internet que tendrá como propósito el intercambio y producción de noticias en español para transmitirse en canales de radio, televisión y medios impresos en los Estados Unidos. Transmite tu voz para expresar tu cultura y denunciar los abusos en tu comunidad. Ayudanos a crear comunidades más seguras. Ven a compartir, aprender e intercambiar estrategias para exigir tus derechos como inmigrante a través del arte, medios y música!
HEALTH IS DIGNITY. DIGNITY IS RESISTANCE
Our goal for this track is to build awareness of healing as a necessary component of all social justice work, and create community capacity for health and healing work through online and offline strategies. We begin by prioritizing the health of people of color, indigenous communities, multi-gendered and multi-bodied people. We honor the fluidity and complexity of identity, and the importance of holding space for transformative conversations about racism, sexism, homo/queer/transphobia, and the many other forms of oppression at work within our movement. Through this track, we will share resources that can strengthen local work across the country. We will learn by doing - making media and practicing healing through-out the conference.
2D ART FOR 3D MOVEMENTS: GRAPHICS TO BUMP OUR CAMPAIGNS
This track will bring together artists and organizers to collaborate on the creation of ideas and images that will capture people's imaginations. It will feature hands-on workshops in print-making and silkscreening, mural-making, photography and video. In these workshops we will help each other think through tactical questions such as: how do we communicate visually in ways that are both clear and poetic? and, how can visual art combine with poetry, music and performance to help audiences travel to other worlds? This track will also convene strategy sessions to explore the role of art in telling the complex stories of our communities' presents and futures, using Detroit as a prime example. Together we will lift up the role of artists as facilitators, storytellers, organizers and educators within our movements, breaking down the distinction between “artist” and “organizer” to honor the creativity within us all.
RESISTING THE INCARCERATION NATION
This track will build off the foundation laid by the Communication Strategies to End the Prison Industrial Complex track at AMC2010. The twenty grassroots organizations who participated in that track have spent the past year building partnerships and launching campaigns, including a state-wide effort to challenge the no-parole law in Virginia, the launch of a national grassroots prison radio project and many others. This year's track will continue to build and advance media strategies for those working to dismantle the prison industrial complex in all of its forms, including: immigration detention centers, isolated prisons, prisoner renting, human rights violations, ICE raids, militarized police occupation of neighborhoods and the separation of families. Bringing together urban and rural community media organizations we will develop powerful of narrative campaigns—combining different forms of media (flip video, radio, print, web, phone, and viral communication) to organize resistance to policing, surveillance, and imprisonment.
RADIO ACTIVE: TRANSFORMATIVE TRANSMISSIONS
Have you ever wanted to produce radio featuring the voices of people within your community? Are you tired of being misrepresented or ignored by the corporate news media? If you responded yes, then this track is for you. Radialistas will offer trainings on conducting and recording audio interviews, using digital audio equipment, mastering the skills of audio editing, hosting a live radio broadcast, webstreaming and podcasting. We will air completed radio pieces on the AMC radio station. This track will examine how immigrant organizers are using radio to mobilize against raids and deportations, family members with incarcerated loved ones are using radio programs to cross prison walls, and how social justice activists across the world are using the broadcast medium as a tool for transformation. Radio Active participants can also learn how they can take advantage of amazing upcoming opportunities to build new community radio broadcast stations all across the US.
INDIGENOUS MEDIA: DISPELLING THE LIES OF THE TRICKSTER
In many Native cultures the Trickster is a powerful archetype; he is a prophet, a liar, a catalyst. The Trickster often creates situations that challenge our cultural ways of life. In these moments, the people come together to discover their resilience and to develop their protective skills. Through this track we will share Indigenous perspectives of media and communication, and how these tools can and are being used to build networks and mobilize Native peoples. Our approach to sharing, educating and learning comes from our cultural traditions and seeks to incorporate these with social justice strategies. This track will draw lines of connection and communication between Indigenous people around the world by illuminating the similarities among our movements of resistance. Through building solidarity between Indigenous groups and the wider social justice movement we will collectively uncover, learn from, and finally dispel the lies of the Trickster.
YALLA! MEDIA STRATEGIES TO END ISRAELI APARTHEID
With the inspiring accomplishments of the Egyptian revolution and its ripple effects of hope and determination for freedom movements across the globe, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement to end apartheid in Israel is more important than ever. This grassroots strategy requires an expansive network of people taking creative, strategic actions wherever they live, work, shop, eat, go to school, etc. This track reaches out to AMC participants interested in utilizing culture, social media and direct action to achieve universal human rights for Palestinians, which include all forms of environmental, gender, indigenous, and disability justice. We will share strategies for bold, creative non-cooperation and resistance. We will also share toolkits, films, websites and information about existing networks of BDS organizers so that everyone walks away prepared to start taking BDS actions in their communities. Yalla! Let's end Apartheid!
SCIENCE FICITIONS & MOVEMENT: IMAGINING A NEW POSSIBLE
So many of the things we thought were in the future, or only in the alternate universe of imagination, are happening now in the realms of travel, technology, security, health, climate, lifestyle - how about movement? In this track we will document the science fictional reality we are living in right now. We'll also continue our exploration of Octavia Butler, as well as other authors, for wisdom on how we approach movement work. Finally, we will actively work on expanding our collective capacity to imagine new possibilities into existence.
