CITL Events

In this workshop, geographer and filmmaker Brett Story offers insights from her practice as a research-based filmmaker and media maker. Using clips and stories from her most recent film, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, produced while a doctoral student of at the University of Toronto in the Department of Geography, Brett will discuss, share techniques, and field questions about how social science research methods, documentary techniques, and aesthetic tropes can intersect to produce new forms of knowledge production. This will be a participatory workshop, with opportunities for discussion, debate, and hands-on exercises. 

A team of TRAC Writing Fellows brings their perspective as students, experience as trained peer tutors, and the results of a collaborative research project on effective assignments to this interactive workshop. Bring current assignments with you to learn how to use them bring out the best in your students.

Nandini Sikand will screen her finished short  One, if by Land (2015, 14 minutes), an experimental short film that explores the politics of undocumented immigration to the global North via land, sea and air. Inspired by three stories of real voyages made from Mexico, China and Mozambique, this film looks at the impossibility of arrival, a visual commemoration of the unknown immigrant. One, if by Land is not a film that attempts to have answers to the noisy debate around immigration policies, but through grim but evocative imagery of these journeys, it raises questions as to why this impossibility should exist in the first place. Using this film as an example she will talk about the creative process, ethical representations of vulnerable subjects from conception to research with an emphasis on ethical story-telling. Sikand will also screen a 10-minute trailer of a work in progress, Inside Outside, a feature length documentary on women and mass incarceration in the Lehigh Valley.

Nandini Sikand is an anthropologist, filmmaker and dancer. Her films have screened and won awards at over a 100 domestic and international film festivals and aired on PBS. She has been awarded grants from The Jerome Foundation, the Center for Asian American Media and is two-time awardee of New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) grant. Sikand is an Assistant Professor of an interdisciplinary film and media studies program at Lafayette College, PA.

This workshop is intended to support faculty  in creating an engaged learning/teaching environment by integrating high-impact learning practices into the design of new or revised courses and in assessing those practices.  It will also will bring together faculty to engage in complex discussions and workshops about aspects of community engagement, service-learning, and scholarship.  Participants will leave with examples of high-quality, reciprocal, ethical community engagement, grapple with issues surrounding community-engaged teaching/learning/research, and chart a course for future engagement in their teaching and scholarship.