A Taste of Our Diverse Outputs
In Pathways we are looking at, but also beyond, the conventional repertoire of interventions to promote women's empowerment, in order to explore new ways of representing and communicating.
Positive Representations of Women in Song
Music is a significant part of the everyday lives of people across age, class, religion, ethnicity and social occasion. Popular musicians are powerful conveyors of ideas and ideologies through their lyrical and verbal pronouncements, and in constituting popular culture. The lyrics of songs are repeated in everyday discourse and find their way into explanations on women's intrinsic “nature” and pronouncements on how gender relations should occur, often even justifying the unjust treatment of women. For example, songs often portray women as fickle, scheming, greedy, and untrustworthy.
During the course of 2008, Akosua Ampofo Adomako from the West Africa Hub will be building on the hub's project on Changing Representations of Women in Popular Culture by having a song competition among popular musicians. Their project on Popular Culture works with musicians to examine songs and reflect on the messages they convey. In this new project she will take the work further by getting musicians to create empowering songs. The three songs that best portray women or aspects of women's lives in positive or empowering ways will be professionally produced and recorded.
Real World
On 17 November 2007, together with Screen South (the Regional Screen Association for the South East and a subsidiary body of the Film Council), we launched the £20,000 Real World scheme at the SEE Festival in Brighton. Real World will give one documentary director, from the Screen South region, the chance to work closely with our researchers on a particular story based on the Pathways research agenda. The director will make four documentaries each running three minutes long, aimed at a global audience.
| The Finalists | ||
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| Rehana Rose Khan Bio and Proposed Story Link to her work |
Kat Mansoor Bio and Proposed Story Link to her work |
Paulina Tervo Bio and Proposed Story Links to her work - missp and YouTube |
Real World is a unique collaboration between Pathways and the UK Film Council. The project will support the talent, skills and innovation of the region’s new and existing filmmaking talent, to influence the next generation of documentary filmmakers and give them access to new research that can help bring about positive social change.
‘I’m really excited about the potential of this project,’ said Andrea Cornwall, IDS Research Fellow and Pathways of Women’s Empowerment manager. ‘The media plays a huge role in how people think about international development and about issues of rights, power and justice. Tapping into the power of the media enables us to communicate with audiences that our research might never reach - in ways that are much more exciting and engaging than those we would normally use.’
We have put together a strong steering committee to support the scheme, and the 3 finalists are going through an extensive development process with both academics and filmmakers to ensure that their final product is as strong as possible. The idea is that the scheme will train academics to work in new ways with filmmakers, and visa versa. We hope, also, to use this pilot year of the programme to develop new and groundbreaking distribution strategies, which will give participants a significant ‘market edge’.
We have had a lot of support for the scheme from a wide range of industry partners and are looking in future at working with Channel 4, Birds Eye View Festival, and a number of other partners. We also hope to make the scheme financially self-supporting. We are hoping to develop a bespoke distribution strategy for the scheme with the company Magic Lantern. The idea is to use the first year of the scheme as a pilot run which we can then use to lobby further support from a range of partners, and use as a model for future work – particularly in terms of distribution and marketing possibilities. We will be looking at different platforms – eg mobile phones and online movie sites.
Documentography
Documentography are a multi-award winning collective of photojournalists who are excellent both at producing their own feature stories, and at training other photographers. Guilhem Alandry and Anna Kari are currently based in Freetown, Sierra Leone working on http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/kroobay/
We have asked them to work with Pathways during their time in West Africa both as trainers, and as photojournalists in their own right. In Ghana they will be working with the National Association of Female Photojournalists. In Nigeria they will be working with some of the Pathways Focus Discussion Groups.
More information on who they are, and the kind of work they do can be found at
www.documentography.com
Tactical Technology
Pathways are constantly looking for interesting people that we might learn
from or work with - we recently acquired some open source media software and
training material from Tactical Technology - who we are hoping to work with in
the future to design some bespoke training for our partners.
See: A
Brief Summary of Tactical Technology (pdf file 37KB).
Partners: