Among the Pulitzer Prizes awarded in 2021 was a quotation for a youngster who modified historical past together with her mobile phone. The Pulitzer committee acknowledged Darnella Frazier “for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for truth and justice.”
Frazier’s act of witness obtained unusual recognition, nevertheless it exists on a continuum with numerous different visible documentations of injustice leveraged by activists, journalists, and bystanders to demand change. Bearing Witness, Seeking Justice: Videography within the Hands of the People, a convention held on MIT’s campus and through livestream Oct. 5–7, delved into the advanced points surrounding the creation and dissemination of those photographs. Hosted by MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W) within the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), the convention examined video expertise’s histories; its function in defending our rights and civil liberties; its interplay with the press and social media platforms; and its abuses, particularly associated to surveillance and deepfakes.
Sparked by Floyd’s dying and Frazier’s video, the concept for the gathering originated with Ken Manning, the Thomas Meloy Professor of Rhetoric and the History of Science at MIT, and have become the primary proposal to safe assist from MIT’s new $1.2 million Racism Research Fund. Manning teamed up with Tracie Jones, SHASS’s assistant dean for range, fairness, and inclusion, to place out a global name for shows. They recruited educator and DEI technologist Samantha Fletcher as mission supervisor and assembled a steering committee of MIT group members, together with school inside and out of doors CMS/W, an undergraduate pupil, and leaders of the MIT Police.
Why maintain such conversations at MIT? According to Jones: “So much of what our faculty and students do contributes to innovation that can combat racism, classism, and poverty. Highlighting to the world that MIT cares about these social issues is really important.”
Fletcher noticed the occasion as a momentum-building alternative. “I was very excited during the summer of 2020 when it wasn’t just Black people who were marching for Black lives. All different races were coming out, white people were coming out — but a lot of that has died down,” she mirrored the week earlier than the convention. Convenings like this one, she mentioned, “keep awareness going about those injustices.”
Video proof, then and now
Over the course of the three-day gathering, 9 plenary audio system and greater than 20 different presenters in thematically grouped classes cracked open dialogues on the intersection of video and social justice. Several audio system supplied tip-of-the-iceberg introductions to analysis from their very own current or forthcoming books on these matters.
In the opening session, CMS/W professor and movie and media historian Heather Hendershot introduced materials from her e book “When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America” (to be revealed in December). When Chicago police met antiwar protestors and journalists with brutality on the streets exterior the 1968 Democratic National Convention, a big section of the American public was infuriated by what they noticed on their screens — not the violence itself, Hendershot defined, a lot as a perceived overemphasis on that violence by trusted community information shops.
“The reality, from my research findings, is that the media underreported police violence in Chicago,” Hendershot mentioned. Even so, the tumult surrounding the DNC planted the seeds for pervasive accusations of liberal media bias and “fake news” in right this moment’s political panorama.
University of Southern California at Annenberg affiliate professor of journalism Allissa Richardson additionally drew connections between historical past and present-day occasions in a chat primarily based on her 2020 e book, “Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism.” The journalist-activists who’ve documented the Black Lives Matter motion utilizing solely their smartphones and Twitter are constructing, in accordance with Richardson, on a strong “lineage of Black witnessing” that may be traced again by Nineteenth-century Black newspapers and 18th-century slave narratives.
Kelli Moore, an affiliate professor of media, tradition, and communication at New York University, took the rostrum with a “provocation” from her personal e book, “Legal Spectatorship: Slavery and the Visual Culture of Domestic Violence:” “Is it possible the democratization and decentralization of the social media technology we use to proliferate our witnessing participates in the centralization of state control through courtroom power?” Moore research the photographic and videographic documentation of injury to battered ladies’s our bodies — which frequently stands in for girls’s testimony throughout courtroom circumstances — in addition to how synthetic variations of such photographs in artwork and media can form public understanding of abuse.
The use of video proof in courtrooms was a recurring theme in a number of different classes — together with one moderated by Harvard University school member and former NAACP president Cornell William Brooks. Among the panelists have been University of Cincinnati journalism professor Jeffrey Blevins, who detailed authorized precedent for contemplating bystander filming of police encounters as a First Amendment proper, and Sydney Triola, a PhD candidate in data research on the University of Maryland who’s researching the admissibility of “sousveillance” (citizen-made movies) in police misconduct trials. Of greater than 10,000 cases of police brutality in Triola’s dataset, fewer than 200 led to felony fees in opposition to officers, and solely 98 concerned video. But when video proof did exist, her findings-in-progress point out, it was usually admitted.
Moore, Triola, and others additionally questioned what hurt may end up when photographs of violence, particularly in opposition to individuals of colour, go viral exterior the courtroom. Social scientist R. Kelly Cameron, one other participant within the panel moderated by Brooks, mentioned the emotional affect he skilled as a Black man in the course of the occasions surrounding Floyd’s dying. He shared one thing his father as soon as informed him: “No man is ever safe from memories … Whatever the eye sees will forever be ingrained on the mind of the individual.”
Video and justice all over the world
Bearing Witness, Seeking Justice took a distinctly international perspective. Presenters reported on the function of video and social media in actions worldwide: from calls in Haiti to denounce sexual violence (#PaFèSilans) and corruption (#KotKòbPetroCaribeA); to condemnation in India of caste-based assaults (#DalitLivesMatter); to laws difficult police procedures in South Australia (#BanSpitHoods). Other audio system mentioned on-the-spot protection of protests in locations together with Brazil, Hong Kong, Turkey, and Egypt.
A artistic function for video in making social change emerged in one other worldwide panel, titled “The Place of Videography in Future Making: Building on Our Pasts.” Featuring a number of African students and artists and arranged by MIT professor of science, expertise, and society Chakanetsa Mavhunga, the session requested how Africa’s indigenous myths and applied sciences can be utilized instead of Western vocabularies and values as the idea to think about new realities for the African continent. The panelists have produced digital artwork and movie that extrapolates from conventional crafts similar to grass-weaving and ritual practices similar to “calabashing” (gazing right into a water-filled gourd for scenes of the previous and future). In artists’ arms, video turns into a instrument for speculative design — as Mavhunga put it, a way of “making what did not happen happen, and making what happened not happen in the future.”
Of course, the identical digital instruments artists make use of to develop viewers’ imaginations can be utilized to deceive. Nonprofit group WITNESS goals to remain forward of that hazard within the age of deepfakes. Faked movies don’t simply unfold misinformation — their existence undermines genuine footage as nicely, mentioned Sam Gregory, WITNESS’s director of applications, technique, and innovation. For 30 years the group has endeavored to assist individuals use video and expertise to guard and defend human rights. Now one among its targets is “proactively fortifying the truth,” Gregory mentioned, partially by new applied sciences that observe the provenance, modifying, and sharing of content material. But Gregory additionally warned that the event of such instruments “risks being weaponized against vulnerable witnesses.”
A productive forensic impulse
“All the tools we’re looking at cut both ways,” concluded William Uricchio within the remaining plenary. An MIT professor of comparative media research and founding father of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Uricchio used his session to discover how the identical “forensic itch” that prompts residents to doc, scrutinize, and name out hidden injustices can lead down a rabbit gap of conspiracy theories. “How can we take that impulse and drive it in a way that’s productive instead of going off the deep end?” he requested.
That query is arguably most pressing for the convention’s youngest attendees — delegations of highschool college students from Boston; Hartford, Connecticut; and Washington — who’re coming of age with video cameras of their pockets. The college students convened for a particular session, joined by PhD candidates Miles George ’22 and Malik George ’22, twin brothers whose entertaining STEM outreach movies have amassed greater than 1.5 million likes on TikTok. Guided by convention supervisor Fletcher, the highschool session challenged the scholars to look at their assumptions about identification and expertise. Fletcher’s objective for the youngsters — certainly, for all convention attendees — was to ship them house geared up to proceed the dialog.
“I hope they can be a part of unpacking all of this,” she mentioned. “Hopefully that leads them to be more intentional and careful with videography, and to use it for justice and for good.”
Archived livestreams of most plenary classes might be posted for public viewing. For extra data, go to bearing-witness.mit.edu.