After having had some time to get together as a class to get to know the neighbourhood and each other as a group, the focus this week focus was much more on getting to know each of our team members, our collective interests, and how we would like to approach this project. Most importantly, this included our Diva Girl, Samira’s, hopes for what we will achieve together by the end of the term.
This session we aimed to: come up with a suitable name for our group, narrow down our mediums for our work, and also understand the kind of story Samira was interested in telling. We had a wonderful discussion with Samira about what displacement and social mixing meant for her, and discussed how we would use a timeline to tell Samira’s story in the midst of Regent Park’s redevelopment. Finally, we practiced the process of storytelling or challenging narratives with the help of popular culture elements or systems, such as memes.
After much deliberation, and what felt a lot like a futile effort, our group was able to come up with our name: the Social Fixers. Despite Sayem’s insistence on coming up with something superhero themed, we considered what would fit better with our topic of Displacement and Social Mixing. We thought “the Social Fixers” was a succinct play on words to the concept of ‘social mixing’, despite the fact that we do not intend to “fix” the issues stemming from social mixing. Through our project, we will attempt to highlight the narratives of those who have been traditionally been left out of conversations surrounding Regent Park’s redevelopment: its youth.
Since most of us have never had previous experience producing memes, when the time came to create one relating to our topic we were all pretty hesitant. It was a very difficult task — especially when you were put on the spot to get your creative juices flowing — but it proved itself deeply rewarding. In the workshop with Lawrence, we learned what stories are often told through memes, as well as how. More specifically, how to recognize a worthwhile story and create a counter-narrative that can be appealing to a specific audience.
The meme we came up with in class carried on the idea of ‘lost voices’ in the community among city planning staff, government officials and policymakers and their ongoing “revitalization” efforts. So, we found that naming ourselves “the Social Fixers” would be quite poignant in our attempt to highlight Samira’s voice amidst a process where she, her family, friends, and other peers, were not listened to but had much to say.
Thus far, for Erika, Sayem and Lena, the course has helped us humanize the knowledge that we have learned in different courses. It has also allowed us to expand the academic concepts and narratives on Regent Park pre- and post-revitalization from a young, female perspective that is not usually recognized in academia.
As for our project approach, we hope to take an arts-based approach, particularly focusing on photography and Photoshop. We will likely need help with Adobe Creative Cloud to design and edit our final pieces.
The topic that our final project will tackle is “displacement, moving and social mix.” Since these are complex processes where many different stakeholders are involved over a long period of time, we decided to create a timeline as a tool of collective memory that challenges the narratives constructed by outside actors about Regent Park. This will include stories and memories in written and graphic form from the Diva Girls with elements of time and place; as well as interesting or memorable events for the Regent Park community as a whole; stories portrayed in news outlets, documents from archives, maps, etc. During the process of gathering data and designing the timeline, we will post some of the content on an Instagram account parallel to our timeline. The desired outcome would be the creation of an interactive online timeline visually appealing that will hopefully encourage the Diva Girls, and others in Regent Park, to continue crafting their story of displacement and social mixing while being publicly available. Also, we hope to further viewers of our final project’s understanding of the role of media and design as tools of resistance and empowerment.
While we are very much looking forward to executing the process of art-making for our project with Samira, we hope to also embed the stories of other Diva Girls. If it is possible, we hope that at some point during the upcoming weeks we would be able to have a few minutes of time with some of the other Diva Girls, in order to include the stories of more than one person in our project. This may present a challenge, as every group will be busy working on their own projects.
The Social Fixers are Lena, Sayem, Erika, and Samira.