AT&T Winter Fellows Blog from Abroad

January 10, 2011

A fresh cohort of AT&T New Media Fellows is in the field during winter break, using audio, video, and other media to capture experiences and research on global issues for the Institute's Global Conversation website.

In a post this week in the “Running on the Periphery” conversation, media fellow Jordan Apfeld ‘11 and collaborator Gabriella Baiter ‘11 blogged from Kenya, where the two are researching the training of long-distance runners, that “our storyline took a whole new turn today with comments about community sharing versus free market influence in rural communities – and how they affect behaviors of runners trying to succeed on the world scene.” They will produce videos on the subject, sponsored by the Global Conversation and Global Media Project.

In another new conversation, called “Follow the Things,” Jeffrey Bauer ’11 recently began blogging about the work he has been doing at Brown and now at the University of Exeter in the UK: “It is quite difficult to actually follow the things we consume from start to finish. Though the label of a t-shirt may say ‘Made in Vietnam’, the person buying that shirt has no idea exactly where the shirt was produced, what the working conditions were like in the factory, or how it made its way from Vietnam to the store in the United States where it was eventually bought. So the basic goal of ‘Follow the Thing’ work is to demystify this process and bring more transparency to consumers.”

From Chile, AT&T fellow Sophia Li ’11.5 has been conducting the "Memoria Viva" conversation about her work with el Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (the Memory and Human-Rights Museum), blogging about how Augusto Pinochet's coup d'etat in 1973 continues to split the country’s population today.

Apfeld, Bauer, and Li are three of the eight media fellows chosen for winter AT&T New Media Fellowships. The others are:

· Jonah David '13 (documenting how globalization is affecting a local community in Nicaragua, in a new conversation called "Globalization in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua")

· Henry Peck '11 (examining how new austerity policies are playing out in the UK, in a conversation called "About Face")

· Hilary Rosenthal '12 (in Australia, capturing how the Tasmanian devil is threatened with extinction in her blog on "The Plight of the Tasmanian Devil")

· Elias Scheer '12 (in India, talking with farmers about biotechnology and its potential for development, in "The Technology of Rural India")

· Alexandra Ulmer '11 (reporting in a new conversation called "Coloring Caracas" on political street art in Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez subsidizes graffiti collectives to spray markedly pro-governmental and anti-Western slogans while independent artists also tag the city's walls in protest)

The eight fellows represent the second cohort of AT&T New Media Fellows, following in the wake of a group of fellows last summer who helped launch the Global Conversation website as a media platform for Brown faculty, students, and alums to post their writings, audio, and video on global ideas and initiatives. The fellowships and website are supported by a grant from the AT&T Foundation and AT&T Corp.

Visit the Global Conversation's Vimeo channel to hear more from the winter fellows about their work, in videos produced by media assistant Michela Fitten '11.