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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: April 2, 2004
Latest Update: April 2, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Designing a Culture of Answerability

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, April 2004.
"Fair use" encouraged.

A request to those who might like to participate in a History Workshop Festival in Lebanon came over the International Visual Sociology Association Website today. Some of you may be of Lebanese origin. But I doubt that any of us can get to Lebanon this summer for the workshop. I have posted the request to give you an idea of what actual visual sociology and anthropology research looks like. The intense academic effort to present a global authority has prompted us to look first at Others in this process. I am discouraged by the lack of focus in my immediate intellectual group on this same approach. We need to do our living cultural histories right here at home first. And you and I have access to that frontier.

Through following through on some of the links and some of the institutes mentioned I discovered some wonderful work on the Salt Institute for For Documentary Studies site. Follow through. Play with the knowledge, as I did when I tried to draw Roger. Then fit what you're learning into alterity, illocutionary discourse, answerability, accountability, imperialism, and democracy. Share some of this visual work. Start conversations about it. Help make it a part of the dominant discourse.

Greetings from Lebanon,

The Lebanese Emigration Research Center (LERC) at Notre Dame University (www.ndu.edu..lb) is planning a 3 day "History Workshop Festival" (Geschichtswerkstattsfest) in August in Zgharta, a town of c. 30,000 inhabitants in northern Lebanon (south-west of Tripoli) with a 120 year tradition of emigrtion to North and South America, Australia and (more recently) Europe, the Gulf and West Africa.

We will be using photos, oral history and video as a history source in these workshops, going back to the 1880s. I have done a lot of work in Austria on the topic, having worked for the photo and oral history archives of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute (similar to Max Plank) for Social and Cultural History in Salzburg for 15 years, e.g. I cooperated with Theo Pinkus and Gisela Wenzel on setting up the alternative history seminars in the mid 80s in Salecina and at the Museum Arbeitswelt's exhibit "Die Roten am Land" in 1989, in which photography played a major role.

However, the use of photos and other media has changed dramatically in the last decade and, as you are certainly aware, immigrants tend to be at the cutting edge of technology when it comes to using video, digitalisation, the internet, etc., simply because of its efficiency over time and space.

My question to you is the following: Do you know of anybody who is working on the use of new technologies within immigrant communities in the field of photography as a historical source?

We will be more than glad to update you on the progress of our Geschichtswerkstatt over the coming months. This summer's event will be support by the NDU Center for Digitalisation.
Yours, Eugene Sensenig-Dabbous

Assistant Professor Eugene Richard Sensenig-Dabbous, Ph.D.
Political Science Department / FPSPAD
Notre Dame de Louaize University, Zouk Mosbeh campus
PO Box 72 Zouk Mikael, Lebanon
sdabbous@ndu.edu.lb or sensenig@cyberia.net.lb

Sue Dion Robinson
Director of Enrollment & Student Affairs
The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies
"telling stories in images, sound and the written word"
Portland, ME 04112
info@salt.edu* www.salt.edu

Exercise on developing a project for the Spring Exhibit: Roger: Who Is He?

Websites for reference:

• The Lebanese Emigration Research Center (LERC) . . . Backup.
• SALT Institute for Documentary Studies This site is too extensive for backup. Roger: Who Is He? was taken for the site. Take the time to explore.