2022 Media Working Group Seminar, May 27-30

In May of 2022, a seminar was held at Green Acre for the working group. Many friends gathered joyously for the first time in person since before the pandemic. Below is the programme from the seminar:

FRIDAY

Plenary - Reflection & Study

Study of Guidance on Discourse

In this session, we will study guidance and other relevant materials related to participation in professional and academic discourses.

SATURDAY

Plenary 1 - Reflection & Study

Study of Compilation on Media and Technology

The purpose of this session is to study passages from the Bahá’í Writings on media to inform and enrich our deliberations over the course of the weekend.

Plenary 2 - Panel Presentation

Contributing Insights from the Revelation in the Context of Bahá’í Inspired Media Companies

Panelists: Mary Darling, Ford Bowers, Laura Friedman, Nava Kavelin

Facilitator: Christina Wright

Participants on this panel will share insights from their experiences running Bahá’í-inspired media companies, including their efforts to apply principles from the Revelation of Bahá’u’llah to their content creation and their approach to building relationships with others within the film industry. Panelists will share regarding efforts they are making to engage in meaningful discourse around principles of justice, representation and gender equality in a variety of settings, from film sets to the offices of media executives.

Plenary 3 - Film Screening & Discussion

Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross, 2018, USA)

Facilitator: Amelia Tyson

Through a screening and discussion of this documentary, this session will explore the filmic concepts of framing (unframing), time and place and how the role of the edit of the images shapes those concepts.

Film Description: Intimate and personal moments from the lives of the black community of Hale County, Alabama, form an emotive impression of the historic South and consequences of racism while upholding the beauty of life.

SUNDAY

Plenary 1 - Presentation

Reflections on Participatory Video Creation and Participation in Discourse

Presenter: Mona Ghadirian

The purpose of this session is to share insights from the presenter’s doctoral research documenting the influence of participatory video-making on adolescent video creators and their communities. Mona conducted her research in Ghana where she worked with adolescent girls to develop educational dramatized videos about the major obstacles they faced to get a healthy, iron-rich diet. This presentation will reflect on the project and its findings in the context of a range of other media related activities in the fields of expansion and consolidation, and social action. It will offer reflections some of the following questions: how can activity in one of our main areas of activity (e.g., expansion and consolidation, social action, participation in discourse) inform and reinforce activity in another? How does an approach that promotes the arts at the grassroots give to art and media a higher purpose? What is “participatory video-making” and how does the discourse about it resonate with elements of the Bahá'í conceptual framework?

Plenary 2 - Presentation

Reflecting on Hearken: A Public-Powered Media Company

Presenter: Jenn Brandel

Jenn Brandel is the founder of Hearken, a media company that works with news organizations to embed listening into their growth and operations to build more resilient companies and communities. In this presentation, Jenn will take us through her professional journey to make journalism more public-centered and powered; the community she has built around her work to rethink journalism’s role in society, and the Baha’i origins of her company.

Breakout 1: Concurrent Presentations

Presentation 1: Young Writers Endeavor

Presenters: Ron Lapitan and Nasim Mansuri

The Young Writers Endeavor is a Bahá’í-inspired literary program that empowers youth participants from around the world to build their Bahá’í identity through the arts. In this presentation, we will discuss how this annual workshop encourages the youth to strengthen their relationship to the Divine Plan, builds their power of expression and capacity to face the challenges of their age through the building of skills and community, and establishes a model of rigorous education in the arts motivated by a spirit of excellence. We will conclude by sharing our current lines of learning, which include preparing our youth to participate in discourse and using the workshop to connect the arts more deeply with activity at the grassroots.

Presentation 2: Characters of the Spirit: Spiritual Identities and Scripted TV and Film

Presenter: Faran Moradipour

A conversation around how our spiritual identities relate to scripted TV and Film. This seminar is split into two parts - "Infusing Spiritual Identity into the Workplace", where we examine decision making and structure, and how to tackle issues relating to ego and gossip surrounding the film industry from a spiritual perspective. In the second part, "Infusing Spiritual Identity into Scripted Story" we'll examine and discuss the various ways spiritualities and religions can be incorporated into characters and stories.

Breakout 2: Concurrent Presentations

Presentation 1: New Narratives and Non-Narratives: Expanding the Scope of Meaning-Making in our Media Making

Presenters: James Samimi-Farr and Eric Farr

The powerful role that narrative plays in media has become something of a motif of the media working group’s ongoing inquiries. This recurring focus is justified not only by the richness of the topic itself and its enduring presence as an object of reflection in the intellectual traditions of various cultures – it also represents a discourse of growing prevalence in the field of media and the society at large. Calls to “change the narrative” and “tell your story” ring out regularly from numerous corners and can begin to sound like so many other slogans. Yet narrative, as a distinctively human capacity, is not an uncomplicated panacea for the ills that afflict our society. An emphasis on narrative as central to our individual and collective identities carries with it a set of its own assumptions that we need to critically assess and evaluate in relation to our evolving conceptual framework. The purpose of this presentation is to offer some reflections on these underlying assumptions, to consider the opportunities and the dangers of a strong focus on narrative in our efforts to create media, and to explore other linguistic capacities and resources for fostering non-narrative modes of thought and expression.

Presentation 2: Online Content, Comedy, and the Bahá’í Faith

Presenter: Jordan Raj

This presentation will offer reflections on the following questions: How can we be more conscious with the way we approach humor? What makes something funny? Can humor help us understand the truth? When applying the principles of the Baha’i faith to comedy, how can we navigate the current discourse?

Symposium Series, May 15 & 22, 2021

In the weeks leading up to the seminar, we held a special symposium series exploring the power of narrative and the challenge of developing stories that address the needs of a humanity that is coming of age. This series comprised two presentations and discussions. The first session, "Some Historical Considerations," examined the influence of certain historical forces on the nature and significance of narrative and its role in community life. The second session, "New Narratives for an Age of Transition," considered further the question of how friends might dedicate their energies to crafting narratives that contribute to processes of social change. Throughout, the presenters engaged the work of different thinkers in correlation with the Bahá'í teachings in order to enrich our own thought and inform our contributions to professional and academic discourses on media.