This week we would like to introduce you to our project “Urban Eyes”. We are a group of U of T students and Regent Park residents who will be studying the changing cultures within Regent Park. This assignment is a product of a UofT x Focus Media Arts collaborative course that encourages students and residents to explore the multi-dimensional history of Regent Park. With this year's focus being on immigration and disease, we are tasked with creating an interactive research project.
We will all shortly introduce ourselves in videos we have prepared to give you a more holistic understanding of who we are, but before that, we would like to discuss the premise of our project Urban Eyes. Our project’s research question came before the name, and we unanimously agreed that we wanted to discuss the evolution of immigration within communities. From this stemmed our initial research question:
What is the history of immigration in creating social communities? And how has the introduction of Corporations / Mixed-income housing disrupted already-created ethnic communities?
We then decided the form of media we would prefer to use would be an interactive website with mixed media to engage with users; in which the viewer can choose which immigrant community’s path they would like to know more about and follow.This medium encourages users to feel empowered in their journey to discover more about the community they live in; they can search, choose, and click on various tabs on their own accord. It also allows us to branch out to research various specific phenomenons that we believe to be vital for a user’s understanding of immigration in Regent Park, as opposed to simply focusing on one broad element. Upon this realization, we adjusted our research question to reflect this idea. Below our current research question is:
What is the history of immigration in creating social communities? And how has the introduction of Redevelopment disrupted already-created communities?
This question qualified us to study multiple different communities and get a more comprehensive understanding of the role immigration plays within Regent Park. It also allows us to understand the role redevelopment has played in immigration and community.
We individually created a short video introducing ourselves and answering the following questions: what is your name, where are you from, how long have you lived there, what is a fun fact about you, and why is community/immigration important to you.
We then started to discuss the various ways we could collect information for the project to create a holistic picture of the different communities within Regent Park. Based on our strengths and skills, we decided that the UofT students would conduct academic research while the Regent Park residents would conduct primary research in the form of interviews that will be both video and voice recordings to post on the website. Additionally, we began brainstorming for possible interviewees and shortlisted a few from the class discussion earlier on in this class regarding Regent Park archives. As soon as we finalize the interview questions, we hope to reach out to these community leaders and schedule a meeting between them and the Regent Park residents.
UrbanEyes: Ipshita, Tanishka, Gail, Lizette, Saquib, Fardowsa