Ithaca College

Patricia R. Zimmermann, professor of Screen Studies and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), convened two interactive workshops entitled “Cartographies of New Media:  Theory, Practices, Debates” at the Visible Evidence Conference on Documentary in Buenos Aires, Argentina, August 2-6, 2017. She collaborated with Elizabeth Miller of Concordia University, Montreal, and Brenda Longfellow, York University, Toronto, to produce and mount the workshops.

These two workshops featured international designers and theorists of collaborative new media projects probing the intersections between technological affordances, participatory modalities, conflict zones, and community-centered social/political solutions. Participants projects and research addressed issues such as health care delivery in conflict zones, Israeli/Palestinian conflict, climate change and shorelines, food security, forced sterilization in Peru, migrant workers in upstate New York, the civil war in Syria, spectrum disorders, food security, and civil society in Ukraine.

Zimmermann’s presentation was entitled “Crooked Stories and Polyphonies:  Open Space Documentary Theory in New Media Cartographies.”

Zimmermann also contributed in a collaborative session with Rosamarie Lerner (Peru) and Maria Court (Chile) on their collaborative new media initiative, The Quipu Project (Peru/UK), which marshalls the voices of indigenous Quechua women who underwent forced sterilization in Peru.  Zimmermann presented an analysis of their feminist design strategies that create collaborative environments for social justice and political redress.