Live to the Maldives: President-in-Exile Mohammed Nasheed, Attorney Jared Genser
It is exciting when a former political prisoner picks himself up, dusts off, and steps back into the ring. All the more so when it is broadcast live to the country they aspire to lead and when the stakes for Climate Change are no less than the disappearance of the small island nation itself. If you think building resorts on sinking beaches to rake in cash for a few developers until it all goes under sounds like the right way to respond to rising sea levels, then tune into this YouTube version of Mohammed Nasheed begging, eloquently and with self-deprecating humor, to differ. Can the likes of lawyers Jared Genser and Amal Clooney provide cover to keep him from being imprisoned and tortured again as a dissenter? You can’t make this stuff up, and we should all be interested in how he will make out in his next bid for leadership. Here is the video of the Panel.
Convos at the Climate Conference of Parties in Paris
While in France for the pre-Conference of Parties Planning Sessions in February 2015, “Les Assises du Vivant,” an “in the conference corridors” interview happened. For a series on the relationship between Science, Biodiversity, and Human Health, the interview explains long-term fieldwork as part of the relationships among anthropological subfields. I talk about anthropology as somewhat schizophrenic in terms of scientific practice AND critique of science but also generative and flexible in terms of methods and results for a better understanding of the complex links between environment and human health. Anthro is organized differently in France, where archeology often resides with history, and biological anthropology is rarer than in the US.
FReeFoRM RaDIo
SEAS student-founded and staffed environmental talk show on WCBN FM Ann Arbor since 2008 combines great music with intimate interviews on environmental issues. Guests range from local environmental justice activists like the Oil Free Backyards movement to global personalities like climber and photographer Jimmy Chin. The show steps away from doom and gloom reporting on environmental issues, popping instead with the ebullient energy of environmentalists of all stripes. More information can be found on our archive site: It’s Hot in Here. The Hot in Here family has placed alumni as professors, landscape architects, science communications professionals, software developers, city managers, white house staff, and more. This digital-media-studio-as-classroom has enriched generations of UM students and audio archives can be found here.
Saturday Six Pack–To Cull or Not to Cull?
This local deer management dilemma is no joke; it pits animal rights activists against disease control and ecosystem management specialists in fierce debates that spill from the halls of our City Council into the sidewalks and perimeters of parks in and around Ann Arbor. We discuss the conflict live on air in the studios of downtown Ypsilanti, where local radio personality (and digital innovation and tech transfer expert) Mark Maynard hosts a kind of “salon” for our times, convivial and intimate, but also captured for those who weren’t free to be a part of the fun! Tune in.
Putting Archival Images in Action
Putting Archival Images in Action Jonathan Schwartz brought me and others in on production of a rough cut of The Extraordinary Passage of the Great White Hunter a documentary about racist infringements on human rights that characterized medical and naturalist expeditions in Africa and Asia in the 1920s. Recovered and restored footage from the historic expeditions of Harold Jefferson (Hal) Coolidge contrasts with but also echos contemporary expedition footage from the African Rivers and Rainforest Conservation group out of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and also from primatologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, with George Schaller and others. With early support from the Coolidge family, Harvard university and the University of Michigan, the film project set out to trace troublingly persistent legacies of eugenics and imperialist science, but also to explore cameras’ roles in enabling entirely new science paradigms since the early twentieth-century era of what Donna Haraway (who was featured in the film) has termed “Teddy Bear Patriarchy.”
Archival Restitution
Gregg Mitman, originally featured in the film, stepped off the screen to partner instead with Sarita Siegel in a markedly different use of Hal Coolidge’s historical footage. Their tribute to Liberia’s post conflict citizenry is a pioneering–and far more participatory–work, summarized here: A Film Never Made. Working with the University of Indiana, Bloomington to ensure public access to and restitution of images shot during earlier eras of Liberia’s history, the feature length documentary The Land Beneath Our Feet asks about created images and their afterlives, weaving together the 1926 Harvard footage shot by Coolidge with the journey of a young Liberian man seeking to understand how the past has shaped land rights issues in Liberia today. Mitman and Siegel’s film is narrated by Miatta Fahnbulleh, a prominent musician and women’s and children’s rights activist in Liberia. It was featured in a panel with myself, Gabrielle Hecht and others at the Nov 2018 African Studies Association meetings in Chicago.
While Schwartz’s original film has not been completed, in relation to that of Mitman it raises fascinating questions about the value of critical curation and classic documentary processes, versus restitution of images and collaborative relations of curation. Both address glaring issues of social and environmental justice, but the latter avoids reification of racist relations from such footage, and enables more perspectives in framing of today’s challenges, including from those most harmed by colonial violence.
From Journalism to Film
The Last Animals, a first film by photojournalist Kate Brooks, hones in on the recent epidemic of highly effective poaching in Africa and elsewhere, documenting not only the ways that animals are killed and within what conservation contexts these losses are incurred, but also how their body parts circulate as commodities within both legal and illegal trade networks. The dilemmas of contemporary conservation are profoundly transnational and vary significantly from site to site, but collectively reflect the looming end of the wild populations of valuable species. As Kate’s mentor in the Knight Wallace Fellows Program at the University of Michigan, I worked with her on the film’s inception and initial funding, watched as a successful crowd-sourced funding campaign unfolded (supported in part by faculty from the University of Michigan). I met her in Paris to conduct background interviews of technical experts, researchers, and museum professionals confronting the rising value of ivory and other animal products, and to take still photos of elephants in that city’s various collections. My students and I aslo participated in a test screening of the film at William Morris Entertainment in Beverly Hills during the summer of 2016, and at the Earth Day 2017 premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan.
From a Film to a Foundation
The film, emphasizing many types of care for these animals by many different people, was favorably reviewed. Kate won the Disruptor’s Award and has since traveled with the film from Toronto HotDocs to Seattle, Sheffield (UK), Geneva, Singapore, and even back to The Michigan Theater for engagement with UM educators. Kate and Rebecca founded The Last Animals Foundation to ensure social impact on these intractable issues beyond the film’s release. Working with designers Christopher Howe and Jonathan Adler, hip hop artist Emmanual Jal, scholars like Sam Wasser at University of Washington and others, the Foundation raises awareness and funds for educational support to families who have lost loved ones who were combatting poaching in and around Africa’s remaining habitat for wild elephants and rhinos, but also supports educational and professional development of young conservation talent from around the world, and serves as a fiscal sponsor for related organziations such as Animals Lebanon.
Media for an Emerging Water Rights Movement
When BBC journalist Leana Hosea came to UM, she wanted to tell the stories of women behind the growing media storm surrounding “water crises” in the U.S. Honing in on the Navajo nation’s struggles with uranium mining and radiation, and the more recent Flint water crisis with its lead poisoning and legionnaire’s disease. we decided to introduce the film’s courageous protagonists to one another. This brought together white, indigenous, and Black activists at Standing Rock and portrayed a nascent feminist movement for public information around water quality and environmental health. Hosea’s searing documentary lays bare the struggles of a families, the strength of a few brave women, and how water crises are actually crises of representative political process and environmental justice. Winning awards at film festivals in the U.S. and the U.K., the film has an urgent, intimate style that tells us as much about the future of film and journalism as it does about current threats to democracy. Leana became the inaugural Environmental Media Fellow at the UM School for Environment and Sustainability and taught hands-on courses to students seeking to write, shoot, edit, and post-digital media for wide circulation, such as environmental justice campaigns, research projects, or public information and education. You can follow her most non profit for investigative journalism about water quality, Watershed which promotes public interest investigative journalism on water, or learn more by listening to Leana’s interview with BBC.
