I believe artists and scholars should engage in public humanities, bring knowledge to the community, and learn from them. This two-way transfer of knowledge, based on mutual aid and respect, is one of the most crucial ways to co-create a future that works for all of us. The following are some of my previous engagements in this regard.

Digital Storytelling for Everyday Activism

In Summer 2021, I collaborated with the Arts + Literature Laboratory and UW Odyssey to run a free online workshop, Digital Storytelling for Everyday Activism. The workshop was supported by the Morgridge Center’s Community-Based Research Grant. 10 low-income people of color from Madison came together for 7 weeks of studying and producing video, podcast, meme, and image-based flash fiction. Participants used readings, videos, and synchronous discussions on issues of power and narrative construction in the media to enrich their approach to using digital tools for telling their own, their family’s, or their community’s stories.

Mellon Public Humanities Fellowship

Supported by Mellon Foundation’s Public Humanities Fellowship, I worked as an Educational Development Fellow at the Arts + Literature Laboratory (ALL), a nonprofit dedicated to democratizing art and art education in Dane County. As ALL was going through a major expansion, I worked with the main team to design new spaces and programs for digital media literacy, (successfully) applied for grants, and edited educational videos.

HEX Award: Claiming the Media Back

“The Graduate Public Humanities Exchange (HEX) program is a long-running and dynamic program that funds innovative public humanities projects that forge partnerships between community organizations and graduate students.”

I won the HEX award in 2018 with my proposed project, “Claiming the Media Back: Public Film Production with Cellphones,” which trained people from underrepresented communities in Madison, WI to tell their own stories via the medium of film and video. With the generosity of UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities and the collaboration of Madison Public Library and UW Odyssey Project, this award let me work on the project from April 2018 to August 2019. The films participants produced in the workshop were screened at the Madison Central Library in January 2020 to a full room.

The following playlist includes a sample of the films participants made in the three iterations of this workshop.

Community Lectures:

In 2016, I gave a lecture on Contemporary Iranian Cinema to the Washington County community at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County. After the lecture, I answered the students, professors, and community members’ questions about Iran and Iranian Cinema. This was part of the university’s community lecture series on Iran.