This session's goal was to continue with the research, outline our goals for the project, and begin production. As a group, we prioritize examining the material we gather from primary sources, as we want the data to guide the direction of our project. Therefore we began the session by reviewing the two recorded interviews that Sumeya and Atiya conducted since our last meeting.
Of the two realized interviews, one of them was of Atiya's and Sumeya's fellow Diva Girl, Fazra. The other was of their friend from school, Maryam. Although both of these interviewees are girls around the age of sixteen, they have unique connections to their religion and lived experiences. We were impressed by the professionalism that the girls demonstrated during the interview process while questioning their friends, a task that can be difficult to do.
In the middle of the session, Brittany, Atiya, and Sumeya walked around Regent Park, visiting and taking photos of places that our Diva Girls feel best represents their religious expression within their neighbourhood. While we are also working alongside Atiya and Sumeya, we also value their responses as Regent Park residents from whom we wish to learn.
We recapped the thematic ideas and premise for the project that we established last week and fleshed them out in more detail. We further focused our project on showcasing the lived experiences of Regent Park youth, and thus want our website to be as inclusive and interactive as possible for the young contributors and intended audience.
Photo taken by Sumeya
As such, we decided that our website will feature artistic crowd-sourced content that visually depicts the feelings of in-betweenness that youth from Regent Park experience. Alejandra is creating the online submission portal through which Regent Park youth can share their depictions of their religious in-betweenness (in the form of drawings, photographs, writing, etc.).
For next week, we have tasked Atiya and Sumeya with conducting four more interviews together using the updated questions below:
What is your religion?
Do you consider yourself religious?
How do you feel that religion is portrayed to other people?
How does it feel to practice your faith in Regent Park?
How does it feel outside of Regent Park?
From the experiences you described, which places in Regent Park were you thinking about?
We refined our interview questions from last week based on feedback from Professor Mehta, as our initial question of "How close are you to your religion?" was not producing a meaningful answer that we could analyze. Therefore we broke that question up into parts that would serve as a funnel to understand the interviewee's point of view from a general statement to a more specific one. We also added a final interview question to learn which places around Regent Park interviewees reference. We want to have tangible places in the neighbourhood to visit, study, and take photographs.
It was challenging to find the right words to formulate the interview questions, as well as the text that will be used to crowd-source artistic submissions. Although we know what kind of response or information we would like to garner, it is difficult to know which language would be best understood by participants. Additionally, although we have some idea in our minds about what people may share based on what we have learned so far about Regent Park residents' experiences, we never want to ask questions that assume an answer. We want to approach people with open minds, without any preconceptions about their lived experiences.
Professor Mehta shared with us two sites of media projects that followed natural disasters that are very relevant to us. These two websites are excellent models of what we want to create for this project:
The online submission portal is now live at https://pointsofintersection.wixsite.com/regentpark. To raise awareness about our project to attract submissions, we will be reaching out to youth community groups and encouraging all of the Diva Girls to share the link on their social media. Our team is excited to see what young residents of Regent Park will submit!
Members of POI: Points of Intersection are Alejandra, Atiya, Brittany, Nathan, and Sumeya.