The Streets and Future-Casting

While reflecting on the comments made last week about my proposed class “Feminism and the Streets,” namely the ambivalence of the title and what that may mean for student engagement, I found myself returning to the basic question of how to understand “the streets.”  Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring and the Spanish 15M Movement have made it all but impossible not to question, if but for a fleeting moment, the impact of social protest movements and the rhetoric produced on the ground. But it seems that I have gotten ahead of myself. Oxford English Dictionary defines the street as “a public road in a city, town, or village, typically with houses and buildings on one or both sides.” To this I add a statement about function, that streets can be viewed as spaces of/for communication, connection, and movement as places where people may “freely” assemble. From these definitions, the streets easily embody democratic ideals, suggesting participation and civilization. However, for a less standardized delineation of “the streets,” I turn to Urban Dictionary and its aptly put definition: “Where the poor ghetto people live.” Only when read in tandem do these definitions reveal the lens through which I’m approaching the subject of my revised course, “Rhetoric of the Streets.” In this course “The Streets” as metaphor of democracy and its denial merge as we consider movements in which people have taken to the streets, speaking out about injustices and working to achieve the democratic ideal. We will analyze the language and function of this rhetoric and how it has affected the national imaginary.

         In 2011, Catherine Grives, Lorrie McAllister, Dickie Self, and Amy Youngs created the media project Community Future-Casting (CFC). The project attempts to “address digital divide concerns” by incorporating video productions into social justice work. Based in the Ohio State University area, CFC invites students and community members to partake in video approaches like digital storytelling, brainstorming, and storyboarding, to identify social issues—particularly those in the Columbus, Ohio. CFC team members “create digital media projects that represent the past, present, and one potential future (future-casting) of their self-selected community space.” In addition to teaching participants new technologies and establishing “reciprocal and productive” relationships among students and community members, the project also presents completed work to city officials, grant agencies and others in hopes of moving beyond mere identification of problems to providing solutions.

Featured in Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning, the Community Future-Casting project highlights its first documentary, entitled “The Hudson Corridor Project.” Calling attention to “a busy and seemingly neglected segment of Hudson Avenue in Columbus,” the final product, only three minutes long, took a year to produce and “many hours of neighborhood meetings, storytelling, planning, and composing.”  Addressing issues of accessibility, pollution, and safety, the project was the first of what CFC hopes to be a series of projects using digital storytelling to provoke urban solutions.

I think much can be taken from the CFC project as it relates to the nascent course idea I’ve described above. To capture and understand rhetoric that is produced on the streets, I consider the documentary (and its political implications) an engaging way for students to articulate a problem in the Atlanta community that they would like to analyze. These documentaries should film the students’ foray into a problem, documenting their journey in trying to understand a problem in the streets. The film should include the history of the problems they choose to depict and the present conversations surrounding the topics. Students should speak with organizational leaders, conduct research, compose scripts for the narrative arc, and can talk to passersby on the streets in which they film. After conducting this research on the past and present conversations surrounding their topic, the group members are charged with the task of “future-casting.” The participants can imagine what the future of the issue will look like based off the information they’ve gathered concerning the issue.