In this session, the process of story telling and meme creation helped us to hone in on our topic of representations. In our conversation, Fazra, one of the Diva Girls, mentioned that she went to the doctor with her mom, and when the doctor asked where they lived her mom said, “Regent Park”, and the doctor responded with references to gun violence, crime, and Regent Park being a “dangerous” neighbourhood.
From this story, we can gather that people who do not live in Regent Park have these stigmatized narratives of the neighbourhood in their head. Stories like this one can be common occurrences for residents of the neighbourhood — as Fazra was telling this story, Sumeya was nodding in agreement as she has experienced this as well.
During this week’s class, a challenge was staying on topic with the activities and discussion. We were unable to come up with a team name we are firmly decided on, so for now, our pending team name is the “Legacy Leavers.” On the other hand, we also had a large success, we made great progress on our topic. In the previous week, we were unsure of where we wanted to go with the topic “representations”, this week it became clear we would like to focus on neighbourhood stigmas and how these differ greatly from lived experiences in Regent Park. We also figured out that for our formats, photography and videography, we will largely be able to support ourselves with the equipment and learning because we each have past experiences with both formats. However, we did state that some training with videography by Regent Park Focus staff would be helpful if it is available to us.
In regards to our project topic, we already know that the neighbourhood is stigmatized by Torontonians who are not from there, so it will be important to not focus solely on the stigmas and outsider representations in our media project. Although important to address the stigmas that exist, we will focus the majority of our project on representations of the neighbourhood to its residents and to the Diva Girls — to people who consider the neighbourhood a home or community. Thinking through what to focus on also led us to start planning ahead by asking ourselves, what is the purpose of our media project? Will our project highlight the issues at hand (ie: the stigmas of the neighbourhood)? Or will it be used as a tool to combat stigmatization? For now, we agreed that maybe it should do both. As we dive further into research and media creation we are staying open minded as this may change. Interestingly, when we asked how do we get rid of the negative perceptions? how do we change the stigma? Sumeya said, “only the youth can.”
Shayla, Michelle, Sumeya, and Fazra are The Legacy Leavers.