WELCOMING ASTRID PICKENPACK

This year, we welcome Astrid Pickenpack as director of CAMRA (the Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts). Astrid is a PhD Candidate in the Higher Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. She is taking over the directorship of CAMRA from Rabani Garg, a PhD Candidate in the Graduate School of Education. 

CAMRA is a graduate-student-run organization at Penn that practices a multi-faceted and collaborative approach to programming and partnerships, including workshops, film screenings, and social events throughout the academic year. 

CAMRA fosters interdisciplinary collaborations amongst scholars, sensory ethnographers, artists and educators within and beyond the University of Pennsylvania to explore, practice, evaluate and teach about multimedia research and representation. 

CAMRA asks questions about the affordances, challenges, and possibilities of multimodal scholarship in teaching, learning, mediamaking, and knowledge production. Its aim is to support media-based research and pedagogies, with an explicit focus on: (1) providing practical guidelines for evaluation of multimodal research; (2) utilizing participatory, digital, and ethnographic methodologies; (3) creating digital and physical spaces for multimodal work to be showcased; (4) critically examining how technology is changing the processes of teaching and learning.