Creative Representation
Topic
This course’s final project invites students to respond critically and creatively to the National Women's Studies Association's national conference theme from 2018: JUST IMAGINE. IMAGINING JUSTICE.
The conference was held in Atlanta, Georgia in November 2018. The NWSA Conference travels from city to city each year to host keynote speeches, scholars’ panels, book talks, art events, and teach-ins in different regions across North America. In recent years, the NWSA conference has been in Baltimore, Maryland in 2017, Montreal, Canada in 2016, San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2015, and will be in San Francisco, California in November of 2019. And like many conferences during the Covid-19 pandemic was held virtually in 2020 & 2021.
The 2018 theme was unique in that beyond the usual scholarship on different topics in history and culture and the focus on teaching issues related to women’s studies, the conference more directly engaged the role of art, media, and the imagination broadly in order to investigate the creative potential of looking forward to what could become the future of justice and more just human relations.
For your final project in this course: Create a single artistic representation of your vision for the future of justice, with at least some awareness of an intersectional and/or global perspective.
Whatever methods you use to express and represent your vision for the future of justice please remember that we all want to see and appreciate it, so save it in a universally readable file format such as JPG or MP4.
You may not simply borrow an existing meme or other pre-made image and call it your own. The idea is that you have something unique and original to express, even simply (you are not being evaluated as an artist here but as a thinking, creative human which we all can be!).
For example, I absolutely love this GIF created by Libby VanderPloeg (maybe you've seen it in the last year or so as it has made the rounds); however, it would not respect her artistic property nor my own creative and critical vision to simply copy it, or copy it and just add a caption or something like that. If I wanted to represent a vision of justice that expressed a similar sentiment, I could (old school) create a poster with construction paper or magazine clippings, or (new school) make a short video where a few friends and I show ourselves supporting each other and literally having each other's back in turn.
The first step in completing this project would be to identify a concept or idea for the future of justice. This could include many common movements or cultural ideas such as:
· "equal pay for equal work" (a kind of economic justice for women and men across class backgrounds), or
· #metoo ideals of respecting the voices of sexual assault survivors (the original movement honored all ages and ethnicities and the founders have since made it clear men should be included, too), or
· "families against mandatory minimums" (a prison reform movement that argues sentencing practices often impact women and ethnic minorities disproportionately), or
· "there is no planet B" (a common phrase in recent environmental movements that often expresses how environmental justice = justice for everyone)
These are only sample concepts. Trust yourself and your vision for the future of justice, and try to enjoy and back yourself in creating something that doesn't have to meet anyone else's high artistic standards. Think of it as folk art or craft even if you find that helpful, and be willing to be surprised at what you are able to do.
One of the main reasons behind the NWSA 2018 conference theme was to address how beyond looking back and critiquing the past or dissecting current issues that impact women and others around the world, we also need to spend time creating and looking forward to what else is possible in order to bring into reality the circumstances necessary for justice.
To put it in more casual language, it's related to the "you have to see it to be it" concept.
This project also addresses how we each can create media, not simply be influenced by it.
Let's see what we each imagine our futures could be and how they could be more just.
Other sample justice posters, courtesy of public domain art/design projecby Amplifier.orgLinks to an external site..
Brave Girl Rising by Ashley Lukashevsky (left); Quit by Chip Thomas (right)
Submission Instructions
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