Our most recent class was largely about solidifying what we as a group intend to do with our media project, which meant deciding on a group name and talking around what story we want to tell and how. In line with our topic of memorialization, we decided on the name Remember Regent, which we hope will capture the conversations that the Diva Girls in our group, Sahara and Huda, have shared with us about the discrepancies felt within their community before and after the revitalization project. Before/after conceptualizations of the neighbourhood point to a recurring discussions on ‘a lost sense of community’. At present, this narrative seems to be a basis for what we want to convey through our project, which is also reflected through the meme-making workshop we did this week.
Some important takeaways from the meme workshop are that good memes are simple ways of conveying (often) nuanced meanings or stories, and that memes are deeply intertwined with culture. A simple image or piece of text can take on a complexity of meanings that likely are only fully understood by certain populations with shared knowledge and experience. This can be a niche as small as our class, where the memes we created focused on topics specific to Regent Park, or they could be relatable to much larger audiences, like millenials/gen z who often use memes to convey anxieties about the current political and social climate. This class reiterated the central role that memes play in how we, as young people, interact with and create content, and especially how memes have come to construct symbolically dense forms of communication that can be used to subvert dominant narratives.
We have chosen to make a zine/(maybe multiple?) for our project, which similar to meme making fosters a DIY ethic and is often used to circulate information that is not foregrounded by more conventional media like books, news outlets, or magazines. Because they are an accessible medium (low cost, reproducible, and can be very simple) zines have become a relatively popular means to intervene in dominant systems of knowledge production. They have often been adopted by anti-oppression action and movements and sometimes are used to critique the power dynamics that exist within such movements, like the exclusionary racial politics seen across the different waves of feminism.
Right now we’re in the process of brainstorming what we think is important to include in the zine and figuring out a rough layout for it. So far, this includes a mix of different types of media such as an about the authors section, maps (important places), interviews, photos, memes, and letters to the future, among other things. Memorialization can roughly be understood as what is included in collective memory and subsequently what is forgotten from it, so through the zine, we hope to create something tangible that centres the voices of the Diva Girls and their concerns about the Regent Park community.
For our next step we will try to work out the specifications of what will be included in our zine and how the voices of the Regent Park community can be highlighted. So far we have not dealt with any major challenges, but it seems like staying on track and navigating how to frame our story will be some things we need to be mindful of. Access to Adobe design programs (Illustrator or InDesign) if feasible may be helpful in the future, but since we are only in the beginning stages of organizing our project, this is likely something we can work around. Because zines can be handmade and don’t necessarily require too much tech, the medium itself will hopefully be forgiving.
Members of Remembering Regent: Alex, Esi, Sandy, Huda, and Sahara