Verde Smoke

Check out this video of the final presentation to the Lawrence Community Works Union Crossing Committee, describing programs devised by the graduate and undergraduate students in the Spring 2009 Lawrence practicum course in the Dept of Urban Studies and Planning (11.423 LAWRENCE PRACTICUM: Info, Assets, and the Immigrant City) where I’m the teaching assistant.

How can participatory media tools be adapted for grassroots strategies to seed more forward-focused institutional memory practices? Can we use these tools, supported by strategies such as reflective practice, participatory action research, and participatory development communication, work in real-time in both the university and community?

The initial phase of this project had the goal to empower Lawrence youth to conduct, record and edit audio interviews with employees of the relocating Southwick Company and key participants in the Union Crossing re-development project.

Barring a snow cancellation, I’m slotted to present my research tonight at the Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group.

You’re cordially invited to watch MIT@Lawrence’s youth celebration event, hosted in the 2nd floor conference room of the MIT Museum (265 Massachusetts Avenue) on May 9th, 2008. This event featured both presentations by student workshop participants and and free ice cream!

I have to admit, I procrastinated a bit around building the rough draft of my final photo essays.  I had all the pieces (in fact, too many pieces) and ideas, but I felt like I was back in high school again, facing down the insurmountable beast of a final paper of which I had too much I wanted to say.  Usually, once I get into working, it flows easily once I get started but it’s taking that first leap.  With this project, the themes I wanted to cover and the enigma that is Lawrence’s identity seemed like a black hole, that I’ve circling around like a hesitant but curious animal.

I called my self a photographer recently in a meeting for my research work for MIT@Lawrence the other day, and honestly, I felt a little like a liar.

Those of you from my former life, who’ve called me “Teach” and railed at me when I made you edit a story down to one page, might have a chuckle at the thought of me writing a script and storyboards of my own. What’s the old adage…”Those who can’t do, teach”?

This week, I’m sensing that we’re going a bit deeper in our examination of landscape – moving from focus on individual vocabulary and grammar of single sentences to more complex expressions stolen from the realm of poetry.

[10/20/07] This week’s ruminations extend the discussion of significant detail from vocabulary to the grammar of the language of landscape in Lawrence (and Austin actually). Basically, grammar refers here to the rules or formulas employed to communicate meaning using land vocabulary elements such as materials, forms, paths, and processes. And like any good sentence, the meaning is all in how you construct it – its order, its relations, its context in time and space. I see multiple grammars at play in Lawrence: creation, immigration, exodus and reluctant residence.