Urban Video Archive

by: Hamidreza Nassiri, Jacob Geuder, Mídia Independente Coletiva

Presented at: The Radical Film Network Conference, Madrid, June 2024.

The Urban Video Archives Rio project analyzes how social transformations are chronicled by digital video making and how those videos can be preserved and structured for scholars, activists, and the public. These questions are of urgency in Brazil, ten years after digital video activism blossomed. Today many videos by citizen journalists and video activist collectives are in danger of being lost. The Urban Video Archive preserves digital videos and ensure their long-term accessibility in an online repository. The prototype of the digital video archive is developed in close collaboration with Mídia Independente Coletiva from Rio de Janeiro. The collection consists of 119 videos that document or bear witness to Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities’ struggles for human rights, and amplifies the voices of marginalized urban citizens. The project is currently supported by Fordham University’s Center for Community-Engaged Learning. We are also in the process of securing Princeton University’s library server as a safe and open access repository for the videos. The archive will be expanded in collaboration with other media activists from around the world in the hope to establish a global database of videos documenting social movements and matters related to social justice.

Global Cinemas Resource

Co-Created With Students at Fordham University, NYC

My students in Global Cinema (Fordham University) and I co-created this resource for global cinemas in Spring 2024. 

Upon clicking on any country’s name, you will see a brief overview of its national cinema, five significant films representing it with brief descriptions of them and their importance, and finally five readings on the national cinema and/or the films. 

I hope this resource will help teachers and scholars of global cinemas.

As you see, each country’s entry is written by two students. As such, the quality of the content varies a bit, but my hope is to work with some students later to edit the entries. 

Justice in Context: Making Sense of ‘Context’ in Discourses Surrounding Viral Videos of Social Injustice

Presented at the Bearing Witness Conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 2022. (Co-authored with Rowena Chodkowski)

“Context” has become a buzzword on social and legacy media for fact-checking or discussing the meaning of shared information. When a video recording of an incident becomes viral, journalists and members of the public use “context” to frame narratives surrounding the event. Some discourse participants say, “this is taken out of context,” or claim “we should look at this in the context of” a larger social issue, while others share new material for “additional context.”

We Scraped a dataset of 117, 026 comments from specific threads on Reddit discussing the issue of “context” in understanding and interpreting the videos documenting the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting event.

We used quantitative and qualitative analysis to understand how people use “context” in different ways to shape their understanding.