While I was in New Orleans I had the opportunity to meet DJ Invinsible (see her company emergence music for insight into independant hip hop world), who was doing some media training for the new young writers at the Neighborhood Story Project who were about to launch their books. She is a very cool collaborative hip hop artist and activist, and she told me about Detroit Summer, a very interesting collaborative activist art project she has been involved with working with young people and others in Detroit USA.
Their methods are interesting – working with young people to workshop issues effecting them – such as bias and racism in the school system – they workshop strategies to get their points of view heard, go out and research the issue with interviews and gathering stories, images, sounds etc, and then use all this material to make their own art. Check out some of the things they have made at the Detroit Summer Utube Channel.
Rising Up From the Ashes: Chronicles of a Dropout - CD cover from Detroit Summer 2007 project
DJ Invinsible also introduced me to the Allied Media Conference - initially a conference bringing together people interested in do-it-yourself media, the AMC is increasingly attracting people who are interested in using participatory media as a strategy for social justice organizing. The 11th annual conference will be held in Detroit in 2010.
On their website the organising collective explain why they organise AMC:
Because media should be a tool for transformation and not a commodity to passively consume; because political change requires open and active networks of communication; because our stories have been misrepresented, misinterpreted, and straight up missing from corporate media. We gather to share skills, strategize, and build the media we envision and that our movements for justice demand.