About
Polivision is a bilingual and multimedia outlet that covers Latin(o) American and Global Cultures. We create new content (video, podcast, and interactive media) and curate international stories about arts, film, music, satire, and other creative expressions of the Latinx transnational community.
Description
How are Latin American identities manifested in popular culture and entertainment? How do these cultural identities dialogue with the United States and other cultural realities in today’s globalized world? This is a bilingual and multimedia-producing project that combines humanistic research and digital journalism. “Covering Latin(o) American Popular Culture for a U.S. audience” engages undergraduate and graduate students in the production of bilingual multimedia pieces (videos, podcasts, stories in Spanish and English, and interactive maps) about transnational Latin American popular cultures, their socio-political implications beyond national borders, and their unexpected connections and disconnections with LatinX identities in the United States. At the core of the digital humanities’ interests, this project seeks to become a bridge between academic research and digital media/journalism, between traditional humanities’ pedagogical tools and the development of multimedia narrative skills using digital technologies, between English and Spanish-speaking audiences and contents, and between Latin American cultural idiosyncrasies and Latino identities in the United States.
In times when international and cultural reporting have considerably decreased in the U.S. media and the Latino population in the U.S. has become the largest minority in the country, stories and alternative narratives about Latin American cultures are not only scarce, but also tend to be superficial portraits and simplistic generalizations of complex societies heavily filtered through the Mexican experience. Latin American multilayered, hybrid cultures are rarely explored in relation to the local and transnational tensions that shape their struggle for identity, their connections and contradictions in relation to the United States, and their negotiations within today’s global media culture. In times of xenophobia and extreme political discourses based on ethnocentric assumptions (or plain ignorance), this project aims at offering students critical thinking tools in order to approach other cultural realities that resist regional stereotyping, while at the same time actively participating in the investigation, production, and post-production phases of the development of creative media content accessible to diverse audiences.
Project Leads: Paul Alonso, John Thornton
Project Team: Maria Daniela Rodriguez, Samantha Bay, Sierra Villarreal, Neta Kanny, Isabel Miller
