For the Race, Space and Environment project, the Newhouse School will host artists, scholars, technologists and community leaders from Syracuse and South Africa to investigate the intersections of race and the environment, specifically the impacts of current environmental crises on marginalized populations.
The Newhouse Center for Global Engagement hosted artists, scholars, technologists and community leaders from Syracuse and South Africa for a virtual conversation hosted by professor Ken Harper.
The discussion investigated the intersections of race and the environment and, specifically, the impacts of current environmental crises on marginalized populations and what it means to collaborate in times of crisis while navigating cultural and socioeconomic differences.
Participants were Zolani Mahola, Jaleel Campbell, Jamie Herring, Farhana Sultana, Janice Limson, Ernest Nkansah-Dwamena and Xolile Madin. This symposium is the first part of a three-part project in collaboration with Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies and South African NGO Inkululeko. Additional partners are Hendricks Chapel, Renée Crown University Honors Program, PARCC (Maxwell School) and the Humanities Center.
As a follow-up to the symposium, we are co-creating a series of video portal installations to bring together academic and community members from South Africa and Syracuse to facilitate organic and organized interactions through the use of audio-visual sites. The intent is to offer a larger-than-life, alternative communication platform to further learning, research and exchange in Syracuse and Makhanda during, and after, the pandemic.
Conversations would take place via video portals that are motion-activated in both Syracuse and in South Africa. These free, interactive public experiences would help reduce “Zoom” fatigue and would connect two seemingly dissimilar communities, 8,000+ miles away allowing people who may never otherwise have an opportunity to meet, to engage with one another.
South Africa Video Portal Project
Read about a series of video portal installations that were created to bring together academic and community members from South Africa and Syracuse to facilitate organic and organized interactions through the use of audio-visual sites.
Syracuse to South Africa
In 2010, nine students traveled to Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), South Africa in 2010, sending their reports to The Stand, the newspaper serving Syracuse’s South Side. Read about their trip here.