The AEMP team has been effectively communicating with their community partners and setting recurring meetings to complete assigned deliverables in a timely manner. On Tuesdays at 5-6 PM PT, we attend the COVID-19 Interviews team meeting to stay updated on the status of the interviews, and to hear about related work from other AEMP volunteers. We have also established Fridays at 1-2 PM PT as focused meetings to discuss our progress on our assignments. The first 30 minutes are dedicated to sub-group meetings, during which the set of students conducting interviews will be meeting with Cindy to cover oral history responsibilities, and a group of others will be meeting with Brett to focus on sound visualization progress. We have also designated Sarah as the communicator between AEMP and our Sustainable Cities project team to streamline communication. We have also been given access to multiple documents that are used by AEMP. This includes their weekly meeting notes, their interview documents, and AEMP platform. As of this week, we will be assisting AEMP with a project they aim to complete by November 1. Working in pairs, we will be editing full-length interviews into short 5-minute clips that encompass major themes. To prepare, AEMP has recommended that we look through previous class projects and projects on their site to get an idea of what types of clips we’ll be making. We also scheduled a workshop with Cindy using one of the interviews to better understand what we’re looking for thematically. Lastly, in terms of our long term deliverables, some of us will be conducting interviews while others will be working on sound visualization projects. This is not necessarily a rigid division of teams, and may be subject to change depending on the availability of interviewees and the priorities for AEMP. We will get more information on these projects later in the quarter, but we have access to most of the material we need to start.
By joining the weekly meetings held by the COVID Interviews team, we’ve learned more about the values and practices they use in their work. AEMP strives to use more secure and less capitalistic (profit-driven) platforms for work and data storage. This is consistent with the organization’s aim for integrity and highlights the dedication to create free and accessible resources. For example, our meetings are run on Jitsi instead of Zoom and they are currently looking for a more secure and alternative version of Dropbox. As we work on this project, we will also be using these platforms to stay in line with AEMP’s values and to encourage movement away from large tech companies, which play significant roles in the displacement that AEMP mobilizes against. AEMP relies on team and partner collaboration that is largely non-hierarchical, or horizontal, to complete their projects. This is apparent in the way that they divide work among themselves (rotating facilitators and notetakers, splitting into committees, partner pairing, etc). Along with these collaborative process in AEMP, there is also a culture of open communication and understanding, which goes hand-in-hand with the success of their collaboration. Everyone is mindful and respectful of people’s well-being and workload. They frequently ask others about their capacity before assigning work and/or requesting help. This emphasizes the importance of understanding your team’s capacity to take on new responsibilities and work in order to achieve a group’s goals without burning oneself out. Moving forward, we hope to use these values we’ve seen in AEMP’s work and community to foster collaboration and communication within our own group. The oral history lecture led by Cindy Reyes & Alicia Morales directly relates to the work AEMP is currently doing through collecting narratives of displacement and resistance in the context of COVID-19. Their work serves to emphasize the importance and urgency of topics we have learned about in class, such as the significance of oral histories, ethical interviewing, and addressing sustainability through the pillars of social equity and cultural continuity. Just as we were challenged to think critically about our positionality as college students in this course, the organization also thinks critically about its positionality in the broader societal fabric and is therefore intentional in the ways they proceed with community work. In both the Arnstein and Sandercock readings, they discuss how power dynamics may arise when working with community members and the hierarchies that exist in ways of knowing, which often overlook the community member as the expert. However, at the core of AEMP’s values is their commitment to establishing trust and partnership with their interviewees, or narrators (as per the Baylor reading), as well as honoring their humanity. They do this in their interview process, which is designed specifically for the narrator to talk about their hardships in addition to how they’ve remained resilient and how they’ve fought and/or encouraged others to fight for housing equity. AEMP makes space for the narrator to bring their whole selves, and asks for their double consent before and after an oral interview, thus allowing the narrator to contextualize and share their embodied knowledge in a holistic way that honors their agency. Furthermore, in their commitment to storytelling and using data for housing justice, AEMP reminds us that by repositioning power in the community and understanding these narratives, we strengthen one of the core concepts of sustainability we learned about in class--people and our connections to one another. Comments are closed.
|
Archives
November 2020
Categories
All
|