Journal Article "Video-Making as a Mobilities Pedagogy"
Journal Article "Video-Making as a Mobilities Pedagogy"
This article adopts an “engaged pedagogy” inspired by feminist thinking to revisit reflections concerning inquiries undertaken into mobilities that incorporate video-making. Moving from a human geographic perspective, the article focuses on several aspects developed in the course unit the author teaches on space, place, and mobility. In the proposed pedagogy, video-making allows learners to focus on mobilities as central to our understanding of contemporary social and spatial dynamics, as well as raising awareness of mobile spatial embodiments and their critical entanglement with ordinary encounters.
Video-making engages students in deconstructing the inequalities that affect mobilities explicating issues of social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. In addition, it allows learners to experiment with strategies and tools that support communication on the move, which are increasingly ordinary. In conclusion, the article suggests that if a mobilities scholarship were to embrace the “engaged” pedagogic potential of video-making, this should be understood as a constituent within the wider politics of mobilities.
30 May 2024 - Wanderers above seas of fog: public screening of students’ videos
30 May 2024 - Wanderers above seas of fog: public screening of students’ videos
On May 30th, at the Torresino theatre in Padua, we took part in the DiSSGeA Department third mission event, Il Giardino delle culture [The Garden of Cultures], with a public film screening. This initiative is held every year to showcase research activities in a creative form, as well as to offer cultural events that are inspired by the disciplines and research topics of our department. The common theme of the current 2024 edition was “Relations”. In the second day of this festival, our colleagues Chiara Rabbiosi and Mauro Varotto, together with professional videomakers Giovanna Volpi, Marco Toffanin and Michele Trentini, conducted the screening of a selection of short films created by MA students during the Mobilities Videolab and the Landscape videomaking Lab. This year both the Laboratories employed new MobiLab equipment.
The screening was entitled Wanderers above seas of fog: Mobile gazes and invisible relations to celebrate the 250-years anniversary of Caspar David Friedrich. Moving through physical and social landscapes, the short films were able to convey a dense idea of what mobilities entail: walking through a valley in the lockdown to breathe again, being immersed in the life of Roma people behind the scene of a luna park, observing the poetics of movement on a shore, playing with the complexities and complications of urban mobilities, learning to ride a bike as an experience of empowerment, reflecting on restricted mobilities lived by foreign students as migrant subjects… As wanderers moving across a multiplicity of landscapes, through the experience of the laboratory, our students offered a fascinating, original, multifaceted sense of material as well as existential mobilities.
Space, Place and Mobility Student Video Contest 2024
Space, Place and Mobility Student Video Contest 2024
The 2023 edition of the videolab focussed on participatory video-making, asking our students from the MA in Mobility Studies and MA in Local Development to work in groups to provide narrative specifically focussing mobility justice. It was so amazing to watch their creative, sensitive, and empowering engagements with multiple notions of mobilities (including transport, gendered, migratory, food mobilities and many others).
This year, the Space, Place, and Mobility Student Video Contest awarded student-produced short films in two categories. THE RIDE received the ‘mobility focus’ award, while LOST IN COMMUNICATION and THREE STORIES ABOUT (NOT) MOVING AROUND received the ‘filmic quality’ award each.
This year’s ten short films and a few from prior years have been shown at the Donne.Teatro.Diritti Festival, which took place at Pacta Teatre in Milan from March 1 to April 1, 2024.
You may also check the 2023 short films out here
Active learning goes mobile: video-making as mobile methodology lab - 2023
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
Mobilities Videolab Awards Ceremony - Geonight 2023
The 2023 Space, Place and Mobility Student Video Contest, April 14, h. 16,30, c/o Multisala PioX, Padova
Since 2020/2021, the students of the human geographic course unit “Space, Place and Mobility” taught at the University of Padua by Prof. Chiara Rabbiosi, have been experimenting with film-making. Every year a final screening session is held during which the short films made by students from the Master’s degrees in Local development and Mobility Studies are awarded by a scientific jury and the audience jury, that is composed of the event attendees.
This year, on April 14, by watching 20 of such wonderful student short films, we also celebrated a great GeoNight in collaboration with the Mobility Expo project. The videos touched upon migration, tourist mobilities, transport infrastructures, commodities circulation and many more mobilities related topics.
The scientific jury included Prof. Anna Giraldo (Local Development, Univ. of Padua), Prof. Andrea Caracausi (Mobility Studies, Univ. of Padua), and Prof. Vickie Zhang, from the University of Singapore.
The winner of the Space, Place & Mobility video contest awarded by the scientific jury is:
- Tangerine by Elios Favaretto and Melisa Onaral – WINNER, for their incredibly poetic film and powerful message of identity and immobility
The three runners up are:
- Resignationby May Layugan, for its cinematic and creative representation of the stresses and refusals of commuting
- Them by Maria D’Incà,for its humanising reframing of a highly politicised story through the voices of irregular migrants themselves
- What’s for dinner?by Kristin Niehus, for its simple, dramatic and effective message of wasted food miles.
Moreover, during the public screening event, the audience awarded the following short film:
- Belarus 2020by Yuliya Beltsiuhova – WINNER
The three runners up are:
- Being a delivery worker means by AnastasiiaPetukhova
- What’s for dinner? by Kristin Niehus
- Yoga nomadsby Simona Condello
Congratulations to all the participants!
Watch the announcement of the Winners by Prof. Vickie Zhang
Active learning goes mobile - 2021
Active learning goes mobile:Video-making as a mobile methodology
Late in 2021, MobiLab supported a very innovative pedagogic activity merging mobilities studies and video-making. The training was offered to DiSSGeA’s students from the Mobility Studies and the Local Development Master programmes and had great success! The activity has been developed with film-maker Giovanna Volpi in collaboration with Nova Didaxis 3.0 project. During three sessions, students have had the opportunity to learn the principles of screenwriting and shooting with a smartphone. Moving from theory to practice, they have also worked in group to produce multifarious clips. A truly student-centred activity, students have then suggested how to edit the materials they produced. As a result, a few collaborative videos have been produced. Playing in different manners with the same clips, each video is about talking, embodying, and emplacing mobility from diverse points of view. Watch them on MoHu Mediaspace.
Video#1 Mobility is a Network
Video#2 Mobility is socially constructed
Video#3 Get Away!
Video#4 Mobility is strictly related to immobility
Space, place and mobility student video contest - 2020
Space, Place and Mobility Student video contest
In a seminal book, John Urry and Anthony Elliot (2010) defined laptops, mobile phones and digital broadcasting as ‘miniturized mobilities’. In fact, mobile technologies feed directly into the performativity of mobile lives. As a result of the course unit Space, Place and Mobility, 31 students from DiSSGeA’s second cycle degree courses in Local Development and Mobility Studies have experimented with using their smartphone to conduct research out there as well as with using archive materials to dig into past and present mobilities issues. Supported by Dr. Chiara Rabbiosi, who co-leads DiSSGeA’s Digital Laboratory for Mobility Research–MobiLab, and video-maker Giovanna Volpi, students’ enagegement with transmedia literacy has turned into a video contest competition. Watch the Space, Place and Mobility Student video contest Reel and find out more on MoHu Mediaspace.