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Future Events
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Seers, visionaries, shamans, dissenters, mystics and explorers all know that sometimes you have to go to the mountain, and sometimes you have to go to the desert. This summer it's the desert. Travel to Tucson a few days before the Alliance for Community Media convention and join us for an educational and strategic thinking experiment. Using an experiential practice for discussion based upon indigenous models of social interaction, 7 Directions, we will consider the role of community-based information and media in the network society's global media culture.
Incorporating presentations regarding the emerging global media environment - its aesthetics, ecology, politics and economics - participants will seek their own perspective on the role of community-based information and media in the coming years. Emphasis will be on long-range thinking and speculation. If they choose, the writing participants develop during the sessions will be published on the presenting organization's web sites.
Location:
The C.O.D Ranch, high in the
juniper and mesquite woodland of the Coronado National Forest, 35 miles
north of Tucson.
Advisors:
George Stoney, New York University, Pat Aufderheide, American
University, Bob Devine, Antioch College, Sue Buske, The Buske Group
Seven Directions (www.7directions-earthtime.com)
Developed by Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees, Seven Directions is an experiential practice based upon indigenous models of social interaction. In this practice attention is paid both to personal and internal work and to the skills for respectful and effective social interaction. In working in both of these areas simultaneously Seven Directions facilitates both personal growth and respectful exchange in cultural and ideological contact zones.
Diversity, multiculturalism, and the creation of sustainable relationships in all aspects of life are concerns of persons committed to education, social change and the quality of life. Even with the best of intentions it is difficult to move beyond the ideal of this and toward the reality of sustaining respectful communication across difference. Seven Directions encourages non-comparative listening and discourages binary thinking and abstract literary styles of verbal sparing and dominance. Ms TwoTrees' work with groups helps build meaning from oral communication and sharing breath, reminding us that we and our media are part of nature.
3 Days in the Desert is the first of a series of experimental, events being collaboratively planned for presentation by Media Working Group, Access Tucson, and The Community Media Center in Grand Rapids. Designed to bring about transformation and growth, these events will create spaces and places where people can gather to reflect, re-imagine and renew the practice of media and community-based information work.
Over the next eighteen months we will present a workshop/seminar in Grand Rapids on creating community information centers from an international perspective; we will also be presenting a media literacy, or multiple literacies, retreat designed to give participants an immersion experience in the historical and experiential roots of literacy in a rapidly shifting media environment. Sessions exploring social entrepreneurship are in the works as well. We welcome discussion with individuals and organizations interested in joining in our collaborative efforts.
C.O.D.
Ranch (www.codranch.com)
Three Days in the Desert will take place at historic C.O.D. Ranch. Just
off the Arizona Trail, high in the juniper and mesquite woodlands of the
Coronado National Forest, and only 35 miles North of Tucson, Arizona.
An ideal setting for groups seeking an out of the ordinary experience,
a place to renew dreams and restore the spirit. Participation will be
limited to 35.
Media Working Group
525 W. Fifth Street
Suite 321
Covington, KY 41011.