Community Video & Mapping Workshop

Up from the UnderStory is community media project that brings together Blue Mountain (Glencoe, Wilseyville, Railroad Flat, and West Point) residents with UC Davis scholars and students to explore how rural communities in the Sierra Nevada foothillls go about making change to create local jobs, sustain the rivers and forests, and build a stronger sense of connection to each other and their place.

As part of this project, five UCD scholars have been engaged in various aspects of collaborating with local residents to create community media.

Julie Wyman, a documentary filmmaker and professor in Technocultural Studies, worked with a group of UCD graduate students and a subcommittee of the Up from the UnderStory Community Project Advisory Group (Katherine Evatt, Alan Willard, Rick Torgerson, Arvada Fisher) to create an "introductory video" to give context to the nine community revitalization digital stories that a team of Blue Mountain youth put together. The resulting 9 minute video produce through this collaboration covers some of the history of the area (mining, logging), the roots of the economic decline of Blue Mountain, and how the residents have been mobilizing over the past decade to revitalize the economy, sustain the environment, and create a thriving rural community. Here is an image of Julie (far right) with two graduate students filming on location!


Ryan Galt (Community Development) & Micheal Zieser (English) came up to West Point and worked with a group of about 12 Blue Mountain residents to explore the idea of mapping and start creating a community map of the area. Ryan and Mike did this by leading a workshop hosted by the Blue Mountain Coalition for Youth & Families. The 2.5 hour shin-dig included a presentation on how different ways maps are made, different uses for maps, and different aspects of a community that might be mapped. For example, the group came up with three different map themes--social/cultural, natural/recreational, and economic--what might be put on such a map. Have a look at what they generated....

i'll post some photos of the residents at work mapping away and Mike and Ryan in action in a future post. stay tuned AND feel free to weigh in on what you'd map in the community.