This week, at the beginning of class, we learned that the CEO of Daniels Corporation may be attending the showcase of our final projects in two weeks. This was very shocking news, which caused us some anxiety, as many of our projects critique the ongoing revitalization in Regent Park. As we digested the news, we decided to translate these anxieties into humour by putting the tips and advice we received a few weeks prior during our meme-making workshop to good use. We made a meme that shows our experiences in the class thus far, but it was also our team’s reaction to Aditi’s news. Making the meme helped relieve the tension for our team and acted as a ‘de-stressing’ exercise, almost like a form of ‘self-care’.
As we fast-approach the deadline for our final showcase, we are becoming more and more excited with the look of our final project. Since we had such a productive work session last week, this week was really about putting together all of the research we did for content relating to Regent Park (including news media, film, academic literature reviews, and government document research). We aimed to work with the rough draft of our timeline to work on our final draft, including cutting out information that was redundant, sorting through our photos that will tell a coherent and interesting story, and editing what we hope to be the final version of our timeline.
As of now, the content of our timeline will be categorized into various sections, so that viewers can read and view different kinds of information according to their interests. The piece will be split into two sections, with the timeline running across the middle of both sections. On the top half of the line, we will be telling Samira’s story. This will be done by sharing Samira’s physical presence in and relationship to places in Regent Park over her lifetime (e.g. where she lived and when, where she went to school and when, etc.); highlighting important quotes from the interview we conducted with her a few weeks prior, and documenting the photographs that Samira took with the disposable camera we provided of the spaces that were meaningful to her and her family. The bottom half of the timeline will tell the story that news media, filmmakers, academics, government officials, and Toronto Community Housing Corporation have told about Regent Park over time. As we want this to be a piece that shows that the histories of displacement and social mix in Regent Park are unique for all individuals, as we all have very distinct intersectional identities, and they each tell a different story, we will be including a section at the bottom of our piece where viewers can share via ‘post-its’ their story. The interactions of the public with our piece can be in relation to the spaces we’ve documented in our project, Samira’s story, the quotes from any literature we reviewed, or anything viewers may feel like sharing.
To complement our final piece, we have also decided on including a story map that will embed parts of the story told on the timeline, as well as more specific information relating to the parts of the story we are telling on a single web-page. This story map will include the trailers of the documentaries we included, specific information relating to the spaces and places in Regent Park, an interactive map of the physical geography of Regent Park, and more.
While we are very proud of the progress that we have made thus far, we were disappointed Samira could not make it to our session today. We were excited to show her the work we have done over the last few weeks to get her input on it, so we can make modifications to improve our final product. We look forward to sharing it with her next week, as it is our final week to work on the piece before printing.
As we have worked on going through the content we have collected over the past two weeks, we came to realize that some of it is not very accessible to your average person. First, a lot of the literature we examined was obtained through the University of Toronto Libraries website — a very useful resource for university students. Besides news articles, most of the information communicated in these sources had a particular vocabulary that is difficult to understand if one is not familiar with it. This got us thinking, and allowed us to come up with an idea that will help us make the content of our final projects more accessible to all. To make sure that our project is accessible to people of all ages, we are hoping to collaborate with Remember Regent to include in the zine a glossary of key terms and words that we feel are important to our project, as well as the other groups’. We hope to also create a sheet that can be circulated at the showcase, as it will be useful for our guests to carry the sheets with them as they walk around the space. These keywords will have definitions that help explain to viewers what they mean in a simplified, non-academic language, which will be useful for those who little to no understanding of the jargon.
The Social Fixers are Lena, Sayem, Erika, and Samira.