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In our day-and-age it is easy to understand how almost anyone can claim to be a storyteller. Someone with the power to craft both meaning and memory through digital media. In this session, we will discuss why the process through which we create and design media is as important to change-making processes as the end results, particularly when working with young people. If crafting a narrative is what we pay most attention to, then what we most often forget is how the storytellers' self-understanding and agency shifts and evolves as a result of the process of creating media. And if we all have the potential to be storytellers and media-producers—especially as we try to diminish the global gap of digital literacy—the implications loom large.

By looking at a simple case study of young people "making media for peace" in the balkans, we will discuss the collaborative (i.e. social) nature of media-making and how this process redesigns the world around us. In other words, it changes us whether we like it our not. Understanding how media creation works, what it can do, and how it works us over is essential as we use it to create sustainable and positive transformation in our communities.

101 - Introduction

• Bridges for the Future: Case Study

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Chapter 3 p. 87-93)

201- Intermediate

• The Devil's Bargain

• What is Narrative UX?

Advanced!

• Conversion Experience: Terrence Malick's "To the Wonder"
• The Medium is the Message
• Joshua Oppenheimer and The Act of Killing
  

• The Spielberg Face: VIDEO Essay
• Global #Stand4Youth
• "You are not a storyteller"
  
• So you think you know the YMCA?
• What is Bayhem?
  

Get engaged! Reflect + discuss with the DSIL Community. Check out the links below.

Samuel is the Communications and Advocacy Coordinator at the World Alliance of YMCA‘s in Geneva. He is a documentary filmmaker, thinker, activist.

Samuel acquired his degree in philosophy from Wheaton College and Princeton Seminary. As a result he spent way too much of his academic career day-dreaming in the textures of continental philosophy, aesthetics, and neuropsychology. After graduating, Samuel traveled for 3 years across the US as he finished “New Spirits“– the award-winning feature-length documentary he co-directed with Andrew Freer in 2010. During that time he continued working on music videos, experimental art video, and editing projects.

For Samuel, documentary film is a way of being rooted — a being-there when one cannot be — if only for a little while. However, it is at the same time a way of making the familiar feel strange again — a necessary task. He continues to believe in the power of the visual arts in an age of magical thinking.

Connect with Samiel on LinkedIn or Twitter @SamuelDFL

Website: worldymca.int
Twitter: @SamuelDFL

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