And the response is...

...positive for the most part!

We just received some feed back from Professor Baines today in response to our proposal video. She seemed to enjoy our decision to make a video instead of writing out our proposal. I think it was also a great way for us to get used to the types of media and technology we will be using through out the project. In editing the video, we approached it as a sort of trailer for our project, just as any feature film has a trailer. And I think overall we presented the base of our project and where we want to take it well.

Professor Baines did have some constructive criticisms with regards to the enormity of our initial ideas for how we would carry out the project. I will admit that we do seem to have a pretty ambitious structure in mind, tying in many different media components. It will be a good idea for us to re-group following our interview tomorrow, as we will likely get a better sense of the direction we want to take the central question of our project after talking to Jedediah himself.

On that note, Professor Baines also suggests that we focus in on one specific question that will tie all of our pillars together. Right now, although we are all researching media, we are all sort of doing our own thing and then coming back to touch base with each other. We need to really get to the core of our arguments and agree on a central focus we want to each address with the different types of media.

Overall though Professor Baines was very excited for us to work on this project together. She has lots of faith in our ability to get our enormous project done if we choose to continue on with every aspect we outlined in our video. Thanks for the support Professor Baines!

Why Visible People?

By naming our project, "Visible People", we hope to raise two issues that is pertinent not only to our critique of Invisible Children, but also to humanitarianism in general.

Children are often used as the face of advocacy campaigns and calls to donate to humanitarian relief efforts. Let's face it, pictures of suffering children bring in money. It's not a bad thing that people want to save children. Faces of suffering children cause us to feel compassion and empathy. We don't want kids to get hurt. No one does. It's a natural human response. It's also effective marketing. We want to point out that adults are also affected by natural disasters and political crises. By silencing the voices of these adults, a humanitarian organization oversimplifies the crisis and eliminates the possibility of peering into the deeper root causes.

That leads us to the second point. The name Invisible Children refers to the idea that the crisis in northern Uganda, in particular, the night commuters (children travelling each night to the town centre to sleep in order to avoid being kidnapped by rebel forces), had been invisible to the world. However, with IC's tireless advocacy campaign in North America and its focus on trying to raise awareness about the Uganda among the average North American teenager, has the focus shifted from Uganda back onto North America? Has the night commuter's own voice and the voices of the Acholi community leaders hidden behind glitzy IC campaigns to turn these North American teenagers into so-called humanitarians by simply joining a campaign to raise money?