Update on Project Activities
In addition to attending our weekly Tuesday general meetings and weekly Friday check-in meetings, the oral history team continues to reach out to people who expressed interest in being interviewed for the COVID-19 Housing Protection Legislation & Housing Justice Action Map project. For context, these are people who submitted their information and tenant conditions on a survey created by AEMP. Unfortunately, most of us have not received responses from anyone. In order to gain momentum with the interview collection process, AEMP members have encouraged us to reach out to personal acquaintances who may be experiencing housing struggles. We have also discussed implementing social media outreach in order to enlist more folks to interview. In addition to interviews, we are also nearing the end of the papercut creation process. Having created and presented a rough draft of our papercut outline, we will now edit the actual audio files into a 5 minute audio clip using Audacity. AEMP members have hosted instructional meetings to explain how to use the Audacity software and securely export the information. We will present these clips in the 10/27 general meeting. To account for the lack of interview progress, we discussed adjusting the deliverables to include more transcription and translation work for interviews that have already been recorded by AEMP members. The sound visualizer team has been working on finalizing the design of the visualizer and preparing for its implementation in the COVID map. In the last week, we cleaned up the design and tried to optimize it to best amplify the voices of the interviewees in the visualizer. We also continued work on the react framework and finished porting our existing code base into it so it can be implemented into the map. Aside from that, we have set up a spreadsheet in which people from the oral histories team can enter information about calls to action in their interview that can be displayed with links in the visualizer. We are now working on the code that will parse this spreadsheet so it can be displayed in the visualizer. In the meeting this week, we worked with Brett and Ben, who we work with frequently, as well as Erin, one of the founders of AEMP, to plan how the visualizer will be implemented into the map. Brett made a great wireframe mockup for the design, and Erin gave input on the goal of this project that will help us as we go forward into the implementation phase of creating this sound visualizer. Going forward, we feel that the visualizer is in a good place aesthetically and now we are trying to finish the functionality of the calls to action and get it ready to be implemented into the map. We have to contend with the fact that other developers in AEMP are working on the map right now, so we need to make sure our visualizer is a finished product, in React, that they can easily implement into the map when they are ready whether that be during this quarter or not. What We Observed and Learned A recent observation we’ve made is that how we edit the interview audio clips is directly related to how we tell the story of the person being interviewed. Therefore, we still heavily influence which parts of the entire interview are made public in the 5-minute clip. With an interview in particular, some of us have brought up a concern in terms of how we go about editing this clip and telling this story because of our understanding of privilege and whose story gets told versus whose are most often overlooked. It’s difficult to explain here because the clip is not ready yet, however it is something we brought up in Tuesday’s general AEMP meeting. We discussed this internal conflict, and a lot of the members said they had also been thinking about this and how they go about being intentional and critical with the stories that are told, especially when collecting narratives of the displacement of folks who are privileged but who they themselves think that “stories about them aren’t centered enough.” However, AEMP team members made a point to say that including this narrative may still be valuable to listeners and that in the end, this is yet another story of displacement that touches on the distinct hardships COVID has caused, and not just to a particular group of people. We will continue to think critically about our positionality, our preconceived notions, and how to go about doing this work with intentionality. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward This week’s readings touched on the work being done by the Brightline Defense group and the Oakland Climate Action Coalition. Both of these groups are working on aspects of environmental justice and while our group may not be primarily focused on environmental changes, we can still see how both environmental groups have to consider some of the same things we grapple with. For example, we’re grappling with questions of how to frame narratives to uplift voices that are usually overlooked. The speakers from the Oakland Climate Action Coalition mentioned that their work needed to grapple these same questions because the work they’re doing is for equity, not equality. This means that they have to find ways to convey the message that disparate action is needed to uplift and assist residents so that this action makes up for the disparate impact certain groups like BIPoC, low-income communities have faced for decades. Our job is to be conscious of these different experiences and find ways that we can convey the differences while still bringing the narratives back to the same systemic roots of these experiences. 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