Advanced Investigative Video Reporting-Child Welfare

This graduate class will be a collaborative workshop that brings together Hunter College students from Urban Affairs & Planning and Integrated Media Arts to use media for community organizing and development aimed at improving the quality of local environments. Students will work in small groups to create short documentaries dealing with a particular New York City neighborhood and a critical social issue residents or business owners are facing in that community. The course will explore the role of media as an advocacy and/or community organizing tool, by asking what the role of documentary is in social change movements and what types of media actually help to create change. What audiences are targeted by these films? What do we want the impact of the film on these audiences to be? How can we create distribution strategies that allow the documentaries we make to actually give voice to underserved communities and contribute to humane and sustainable community development? We want to explore the use of varying styles of documentary to observe, document, inform, and impact audiences emotionally, intellectually and politically. Film as well as other media may be employed.

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