How to make small movies with your cellphone to spread your ideas, your stories, your feelings in the name of cultures of peace?
This course, intending to be a laboratory, consists of three parts, all of them alternating between a theoretical/philosophical approach and a practical one. The three parts will not follow one after the other, but will be combined, as also in media reality their lines keep blurring.
OUR LAB
Making films with cellphones by now is something of commonplace, just like to spread them on the social media. The conscious use – and this is the important point – of the medium of film opens up to great opportunities to reach many people in the sense of peace work and peace studies.
WHAT TO EXPECT
We will start our seminar with a binary system, where we will have a plenary session (lecture, discussion and/or group work) every second day, while on the other days talks between individual students/working groups and us as well as group work will take place. By way of a general structure, we will start off with an introduction into our topic both on a theoretical and practical level. Then we will “send you out into the world”, whichever world you may have available to you at the time, to do your research and collect stories as well as their backgrounds. Later, we will work on the storytelling aspects, and again this will include academic storytelling as well as a more poetic style, and you will see how perfectly well both go together without excluding the other!
This is our plan right now, and it is the one we will start our course with together. Once we have started, we will be flexible to adjust and adapt the working plan according to the circumstances and the projects that we decide on together. Despite what you may now have in mind with regards to (magical?) (fairy-tale?) storytelling days, we will work with academic rules and we will also look at them more closely, because even rules are based on stories, and because academia happens in a context that we need to be aware of as part of our stories.
Fear not, however, there will be time for days of wonder(ing) if you care to look for it. We will have lots of time to listen to stories, to collect stories and to work on them in many different aspects of peace studies perspectives.