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New reading
Look what we’re reading/watching this week:
- Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling — by Sabrina Jones and Marc Mauer: An update of Mauer’s popular text about the exponential growth of the prison industry and the criminal justice system.
- Le gamin au vélo (The kid with a bike): about a young boy whose father gives up his parental rights and who is taken into care by a local hairdresser; she becomes his family.
- The Arrival — by Shaun Tan: A stunning, wordless graphic novel about a man’s journey to a new a land, full of the emotion of being lost, found, mis-read, welcomed, and seeking and finding home.
Educational Justice — online video resources
The Global Action Project (G.A.P.) has a rich history of pursuing and advocating for effective social change through innovative uses of media. In preparing for Year 2 of our YMEJ Seminar, we found a collection of videos that G.A.P. has listed under the category of Educational Justice. Perfect, right? The videos (short flims, PSAs) address educational issues related to:
- undocumented students
- youths’ legal rights
- homophobia and violence
- the school to prison pipeline
This one in particular caught our eye:
This video questions why people leave school or fail to graduate. Rather than focusing on the more commonly held idea of “drop outs,” the video examines the trends of push-outs, and the many ways that young people feel discouraged by the educational system. Interviewing educational researchers, students, and each other, we try to present the stories behind the statistics. – See more at: http://global-action.org/video/set#sthash.9eM2qbfj.dpuf
Here are a couple of other online video repositories that include short films in a variety of formats that take up issues of social change and education in a wide embrace:
- The Media that Matters Film Festival — click here for the collection related to youth; explore the rest of the site for films on other topics including economic justice, gender, politics, and more.
- 3MinuteMedia – click for 3 years’ worth of short films under 3 minutes in length on topics such as the women’s revolution in Egypt, recycling, the arts in schools, and marriage equality. (There’s a call for entries out now for submissions for the 2013 festival.)
Follow GAP on twitter: @gapyouthmedia
Follow 3minutemedia on facebook and twitter
Poverty: A global perspective
Hungry mothers, starving children
–by Mathangi Subramanian (TC alum, Fulbright Scholar), writing for The Hindu
Excerpt:
“Too often, we blame poverty on the poor. It is easier than admitting our complicity in the systems that reproduce our privilege and reinforce the hardships of others. After all, if we were to truly commit to eliminating poverty, we would have to sacrifice. We would have to pay higher taxes, make space in our neighborhoods for affordable housing, send our children to publicly funded government schools, and hold our politicians accountable for our most vulnerable citizens. Instead, we shake our heads and sigh when the media tells us what we want to hear: that the death of children is not in our hands.”
Foster care in fiction
This summer, as we prepare for Year 2 of our project, we are scouring the web and bugging our friends and everyone we meet to share interesting resources with us that represent the lives of foster youth in different ways.
The new ABC Family tv show The Fosters debuted this summer and attempts to raise important questions about institutional, social, and cultural context of the lives of youth who are tethered to the foster care system.
And we’ve just learned about a fascinating sounding novel called The Panopticon, a novel by Jenni Fagan that focuses on the life of Anais, a young woman who has grown up in foster care and finds herself being sent to “the Panopticon, a home for chronic young offenders.” More on this after we’ve read it through.
Here are a few others that we’ve read and loved and discussed during Year 1 of the project — not all are exactly about the foster care system, but all do take up questions and themes of home, belonging, family, kinship, and love:
Becoming Naomi Leon
The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
Geek Girl
Do you have a resource to share that depicts the lives of youth in foster care? We’ve been collecting titles all summer and will soon post a list of both fiction and documentary resources — but we’re always looking for more, so please share your titles with us!
Youth, Media, and Educational Justice 