Patricia Zimmermann, Charles A. Dana Professor of Screen Studies and Director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), presented an invited talk in the Department of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania on September 14, 2022.
Her presentation was entitled "A Critical Historiography of Participatory US Community Media: Theories, Practices, and Visualities of the Unknown Archives of WE TELL."
The talk elaborated on the historiographic principles, theoretical conundrums, and archival complexities of researching, conceptualizing, and programming marginalized media work and independent media organizations for the six-program national touring exhibition. She co-programmed "We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media" with Louis Massiah from Scribe Video. The programs have toured to over twenty universities, museums, and community media centers.
In addition, Zimmermann and Massiah conducted a workshop for doctoral and undergraduate students exploring the ways in which community media and marginalized independent media necessitate the development of new theoretical and practical models to understand the key questions of significance, why, and how in research and curatorial practices. They focused on one of the six programs in WE TELL, "Wages of Work," which probes labor and union organizing media across a fifty year time span and in different regions of the US.
