made it back safely...with a minor cold and a bit achy from curling up on two seats (no booth car this time) on a freezing cold traincar, in which the bright lights never shut, for 8 hours or so! funny incident on the local bus to get to the train station: i wanted to ask how many stops til the train station or something like this, so i did so in spanish, since that had proved useful over the course of the previous days - and the driver, 50/60 something, said no no no understand, and then from what i gathered in his romanian, he only speaks romanian and russian b/c of the soviet presence during the cold war! and hence that he was always taught that english was bad!
anyway, sunday -- shitty weather, so ursa and i stayed in, made soup, and watched movies on her laptop....four of em.
monday morning started class....33 participants and almost 10 professors for the next two weeks. very diverse group - not like uni pamphlet diversity bullshit - really a diverse group. people are from: uzbekistan, afghanistan, kazakstan, china, india, pakistan, mexico, guatemala, slovenia, croatia, bosnia, turkey, canada, poland, russia, germany, hungary, romania...and then four americans - myself and two phd students from penn's school of communication (one, a taiwanese-american, and the other egyptian-american), and one from american university from texas.
some journalists, one person who manages the million dollar media accts for UN in Central Asia...someone who studies gypsy rep. in film, mostly people that are highly media-involved phd students...had classes on civil society, media, conceptualizations of democracy in post-authoritarian regimes, and the role of media, and intl organizations in combating aids/hiv in africa, etc. etc. etc. I'm presenting my work on graffiti in buenos aires tomorrow as part of the alternative & minority media group...should be interesting...another person is speaking about minority rep. in guatemalan media, another about radical, indpt filmmakers in mexico, and another about internet censorship in china. i think the most interesting aspect of these classes has really been when the lecturers get interrupted by student discussions, since everyone has so much to contribute. The two chinese phd students have presented work at conferences about internet censorship in China, and today they explained to us the ways in which people circumvent the google filters, etc. to post controversial blogs, and other news media by using ancient Chinese, or reconfiguring the layout of script via specialized software (i.e. vertically, rather than horizontally)...Also, there has been much talk thrown about concerning media ownership (i.e. US v. BBC, which is paid for out of taxes).
tonight: france-italy, and romania-netherlands .... very excited.
hope all of you are doing well,
amie
No comments:
Post a Comment