OPENING RITUALS

Step into the Opening Rituals of the 2019 Screening Scholarship Media Festival  at the University of Pennsylvania, a CAMRA-organized festival supported in part by the Center for Experimental Ethnography. This year's opening features a collaborative, interactive ritual performance with Aimee Cox (Center for Experimental Ethnography Faculty Fellow 2019), Saya Woolfalk (New York) and Daniel Alexander (Mellon Foundation Creative Research Fellow at the University of Washington ) and coordinated by Aishah Shahidah Simmons. The artists discussed their process during a panel the following day.  They addressed issues related to improvisation, and questions of spirituality and identity, movement and mobility.

The Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) provides a creative, collaborative space to explore the affordances and challenges of multimodal strategies in research, and to interrogate their social implications. SSMF is a hybrid between a traditional academic conference and a film/media festival. The 2019 SSMF features works rendering matters of concern and the present histories of: Indigenous people; Persons under any form of detention; Diasporic communities; LGBTQ+ collectives; and environments in conflict.