The Story of a City seeks to bring the repressed voice of Diyarbakir beyond the borders of Kurdish regions in Turkey. It aims to portray the unprecedented resistance of the Kurdish people after the breakdown of the 2015 ceasefire which caused several hundred deaths and displaced thousands in Sur, the central district of Diyarbakir, other neighborhoods and many towns across the Kurdistan region in Turkey. 

The weeklong CDS Summer School collaborative workshop will develop classroom materials that reflect multidisciplinary perspectives on data justice, including work on inequity in the history of computing and data, contemporary scholarship that centers racial justice and the experiences of minoritized groups, the legal structures through which technological systems proliferate and are governed, and ethical principles that could guide better design and implementation of future technologies. These materials will empower our participants in their own teaching practice, and will be published to support other educational programs centered on data justice at UCSD and elsewhere.

Pacific Something is a series of workshops posing questions to the place that we are and the placing we do. These workshops will bring artists and activists from around the Pacific rim to introduce us to “production democracy”, the place where the politics of production and the aesthetics of collectivity meet. These two-day workshops will combine technical instruction with on-the-ground perspective from sites of popular struggle. Participants will then bring in their own artistic, activist and research contexts in order to design new variations on these interventions.

Our project experimentally maps an abolition geography of San Diego. We follow the lead of local anti-carceral and migrant rights activists to visualize, conceptualize, and materialize “freedom [as] a place" (Gilmore, 2017).  This project understands both abolition and geography as work that emphasizes political contestation and movement in efforts to spatialize liberation. This project began in 2021 in collaboration with the Free Them All- San Diego coalition; and will be working with Centro Cultural de la Raza for this grant cycle. 

Media democratization and increased support for community media were a core part of the decolonizing political projects epitomized in the refounding of Bolivia as a plurinational state. This project is a film documentary (approximately 30 minutes) about the importance of community radio stations in Bolivia. It seeks to explore the histories, practices, and perspectives of community media makers and communication rights advocates in Bolivia, opening the question of what the goal of ‘media democratization’ is or should be. 

Out of the hundreds of journalists and photographers covering the Vietnam War, only about 70 were women. The experience of women photojournalists during Vietnam wasn’t only a mirror image of what their male counterparts also witnessed on the battlefield—thus ultimately negating the gendered bigotry hoisted upon women as war correspondents—but also that women brought a unique perspective that combined documentation of the senseless meat-grinder of battle, with a deep sympathy for greater humanity. 

This project is a small-scale mobile exhibition featuring the work of these groundbreaking photojournalists; it will include not only curated photographic print selections, but also utilize augmented reality technology to enrich the viewer’s understanding of the photojournalists' work by producing a multi-modal educational media experience.

The Media And Consolidation Research Organization (MACRO) Lab is a scholarly community, research lab, and online resource about media ownership for instructors, students, journalists, and citizens. We aim to provide a space that not only addresses the lack of accessible, critical materials about media consolidation, but also operates as a space to speculate and envision alternative media systems. The MACRO Lab privileges the analysis of diversity, history, power, and complexity in its goal of educating citizens about the democratic dangers of media consolidation.