Exposed and Affected: A Brief Study on Human Rights and Media

In the beginning of Calling the Ghosts (a film about the genocidal camps during the Balkan War of 1995) , a woman asks, "If I stay silent, how moral would that be?" Without going into great detail about the use of gender-based violence to enforce eugenics during this war-time, the opening of said film begs the question: Why is an acknowledgment of past trauma so difficult? Further than that, how does one articulate the effects of trauma as it relates to cultural identity? Recalling those instances brings back the re-memory of the physical anguish (the term "rememory" made known in Toni Morrison's literature) and mental strife it had and continues to have upon the body. Because this story was so engrossing, instead of writing a linear review, I'd rather present it in fragmented poetry form: A Camp, they called it, but more like a prison. Muslim and Croat intellectuals were the first victims. There were business offices with blood around it, order...

  “African Underground: Hip Hop in Senegal”  touched me because it showed how  using lyrics to preach positivity through  hip hop and how it ameliorates its community, defying the stereotypes that the masses might have about popular hiphop. This film was contextualized by Media That Matters. What do we mean by contextualizing the film? We want to package a film with more information than what is included in the content. Making a documentary film and screening it is called the dissemination of information, the first step needed but not the sole basis of creating change. Bringing in educational paradigms helps the narrative to shift into a transformative model. As a human rights educator, you need to open a space for discourse with an emphasis on public participation, not an attack on already set up laws. By creating different Strategies, you innovate different Ethics of Representation. Boca De Lixo  by Eduardo Coutinho  (the beginning can be v...

Screening: Pictures from A Revolution: A Memoir of the Nicaraguan Conflict. -Susan Meiselas. Meiselas photographed the civil war in Nicaragua and then returned to the subjects in her portraits, trying to track them down, 10 years later. She presents them with the photograph she took, outlining previous to her encounter with them why and how she photographed the scene followed by a non-invasive inquiry with the subject and the subject's family on how they felt to be a part of the event taking place within the photograph. Each photograph provides a narrative construction. The narrative construction prompts the viewer to contemplate memory and memory's place in describing a cultural conflict.  It begs the question: How do we retrospectively approach Meiselas’ project while maintaining an understanding of Avishai Margalit’s Ethics of Memory ? In Ethics of Memory , Margalit writes that our moral relationships are thin entities of behaviour, but ethical relationships align with...