By Hannah Stewart (Comm’19)

The Mimesis Documentary Festival, hosted by the College of Media, Communication and Information’s Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media, will hold community film screenings, artist talks and more from Aug. 14 through 18. This year, they received nearly 300 submissions from more than 30 countries, and will feature more than 60 documentaries.

“Being five years in means that we’re fulfilling a need in the international documentary community—the need for a festival that’s really artist-focused and community based,” said Eric Coombs Esmail, director of the center.

What: Mimesis Documentary Festival

When: Aug. 14-18

Where: Venues throughout Boulder as well as virtual screenings

Who: Festival passes ($80) and virtual passes ($30) are available to the public. CU Boulder community members are eligible for a 50% discount, and free tickets are available to CU Boulder students.

Now that it’s a well-known annual event, the festival is attracting more community partnerships and sponsors. Cool Boulder, along  with the Endangered Species Coalition, subsidized artist submission fees for projects addressing nature-based climate solutions. These projects are part of a special category of films called that will be featured across two days in four different documentary and live performance blocks. Other sponsors include the City of Boulder and the Boulder Public Library.

Associate Professor Erin Espelie, who holds a joint appointment in both cinema studies and critical media practices, is also a filmmaker whose documentary, , will be featured as part of the block called The Tree Remembers. Emergent technologies and media art practices PhD candidates and will also have their works shown in a Moving Creatures block.

Two other particularly exciting pieces this year include the pre-festival screening of by Terra Long and by artist in residence Miryam Charles.

Long’s film was screened Saturday, Aug. 10, at the Boulder Public Library’s Canyon Theater, and was followed up with a live Q&A with the filmmaker. While this is not the first time Mimesis has hosted a pre-festival screening, Coombs said this was special because of the collaboration.

“We’ve done pre-festival screenings twice previously, but they’ve been under the radar,” he said. “This year, our partnership with the Boulder Library to make sure the festival is reaching the community beyond just the event itself. The library has gotten more funding and it’s opened up a lot more avenues for collaboration.”

Artists in residence are chosen by the programming team, and Charles was the perfect candidate because the team saw her as “someone who really works at the boundary of what documentary might become.” Her film, which reflects on the unresolved death of her cousin, will be shown at 8 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 16, and she will host a master class the next morning at 10; both will take place at the Boedecker Cinema.

“The main goal is to host something that is valuable not only to the artists, but to the broader Front Range community in general,” Coombs said. “We want to make Mimesis sustainable and something that can survive the test of time. We want to grow the community we’ve built and demonstrate to that documentary is for everyone.”

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By Hannah Stewart (Comm’19)

For Ricarose Roque, educational justice and equity are paramount. As an assistant professor in the Department of Information Science, much of her research explores the concept of inclusive learning experiences. This research—which often considers the place of technology in a learning environment—won her recognition by Division C of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Ricarose Roque
Assistant Professor
Information Science

Each year, the AERA recognizes education researchers and Roque, who also has a courtesy appointment in the School of Education, was honored with the Jan Hawkins Award, which highlights contributions to humanistic research and scholarship in learning technologies.

“Far too often, research on learning with technology focuses on the coldly cognitive aspects of learning,” explained Joe Polman, associate dean for research in CU’s School of Education. “In contrast, this award is designed to recognize research and development on learning with technologies that takes into account how human beings have complex and important lives.”

Through the Creative Communities research group, Roque and her team have been conducting research that engages with communities at multiple levels. For example, some projects explore computing outside the classroom while others investigate relationship and identity building. 

The “build on families’ relationships and cultural backgrounds and to strengthen their social support and expertise around computing,” according to the program’s website.

Inspired by her family’s Filipino culture and the experience of growing up as an immigrant in the U.S., Roque creates her projects and programs in such a way that supports and uplifts local communities. As a result, since coming to CMCI, she has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

“Like Jan Hawkins, Ricarose recognizes the great potential for new technologies in the learning process, but she has a humanist’s perspective on the centrality of social and cultural context,” MIT Professor of Learning Research Mitchel Resnick wrote in his letter nominating Roque. “Also, like Jan, Ricarose brings a warmth and kindness to everything she does, always willing to help and support others, both emotionally and intellectually.”

Roque was that included five individuals from universities across the country and honored at the , which was held in April in Chicago. As a recipient of the Jan Hawkins Award, Roque will receive a $500 stipend, plaque and opportunity to speak at next year’s AERA award session.

“I feel very proud and humbled to receive this award, especially as it honors Jan Hawkins' legacy of humanistic research and uses of learning technologies that respect young people and their communities,” Roque said.

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Featuring Lisa Marshall (Strategic Relations and Communications) 

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Associate Professor Reece Auguiste is co-editing a book tentatively titled African Cinema: Modernity and Moving Image Culture, which is in the final stages of chapter revisions before submitting the manuscript to peer reviewers in January and then to press in summer 2020. He also submitted an article titled “Visible Things Unseen: Co-creation and Its Philosophical Turn,” which will appear in AfterImage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Vol.47. No.1 this March. He peer-reviewed an article for Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal and another article for The Journal of Media Practice and Education. Auguiste presented a paper titled “Can the Archive Speak? In Search of the Interior Life of Archives” at the Reframing Africa: Future Archives conference hosted by the University of Witwatersrand, and at The Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, in October 2019.

Assistant Professor Betsey Biggs is continuing work on MELT. She also held a laptop performance as part of the Musical Ecologies series in New York City.  She has a soundtrack coming out in April for her music film, MELT: The Memory of Ice.

Instructor Pat Clark recently presented Pathways to Mixed Reality: Oral History, the i-Doc, and the Archive at the 2019 Oral History Association’s Annual Meeting. This multi-dimensional immersive media project highlights landscape photography and the environment. He was also awarded a grant through OpenCU Boulder to adopt Online Educational �ƹ���Ƶ (OER) as an alternative to high-cost course materials.

Instructor Eric Coombs Esmail, director of the Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media, along with the center's associate director, Instructor Christian Hammons, completed a short film, Rumor, which will premiere at a major festival this year. They also completed principal photography on their grant-funded documentary feature, American Refuge, about homelessness in the national forests of the American West. The project received the Audience Award at the Society for Visual Anthropology Pitch Fest at the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association in Vancouver. As director and associate director of the Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media, the pair launched Mimesis, a grant-funded program to transform the center into a hub of documentary media production on campus, in the Western U.S., and beyond. The center now offers masterclasses, microgrants and support for project development, fundraising, production, distribution, and outreach, and it will debut the Mimesis Documentary Festival later this year.

Assistant Professor Erin Espelie had a solo show in Los Angeles at the Egyptian Theater with the L.A. Film Forum, where she premiered her new film Tenebrio molitor and a night of short films at the Regulator Gallery in Norman, Oklahoma. In August she was invited to install her film Silent Springs on site at the Sagehen Creek Field Station in northern California. She recently published in the , and she plans to chair a panel at the 2020 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference entitled, Deep Horizons: Examining the Spectrum of Uneven Ecocide & Enduring Futures.

Associate Professor Tara Knight’s short animation film Unsettled continued to be presented in a wide array of venues in 2019 - from the top animation festival in the world (Annecy, the "Cannes of Animation"), to a program on the history of "Animation and the Fine Arts" (Zagreb), to a US tour with Black Maria Film Festival (Director's Choice Award). Current iterations of her collaborative Sound Planetarium VR project were invited to be presented at conferences for art and technologists (Museum of Science Boston), for live performance designers (Live Design International), and for astrophysicists (University of Liege, Belgium). The animated video projection Knight created for the theatrical performance The Great Wave at the Berkeley Rep was reviewed as "handsome," "intricate," "stunning," "breathtakingly immersive," and "bone-rattling, eye-popping." Knight also received the 2019 William R. Payden Award for Faculty Teaching and Research Excellence.

Professor and Department Chair Teri Rueb published a chapter in the Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art (Routledge, June 2020).  This month, she’s attending a gathering of Critical Media Study program heads at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, along with DCMP doctoral student Toma Peiu. The universities represented will include University of the Arts, London; Université Paris Sciences et Lettres; and Goldsmiths, University of London. This month she’ll also be presenting as part of the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s alumni talks. She is currently collaborating with Roberto Azaretto, a DCMP doctoral student, and Jiffer Harriman, lecturer out of ATLAS, on a commission from the Fiske Planetarium to create a sonic mobile experience based on the scaled solar system model installed on campus. And, she is exhibiting work in the group show, Charting the World: Subjective Map Making at Suffolk University in Boston, which runs from Jan. 30 through Feb. 27. 

Instructor Jason Sanford recently finished composing an album’s worth of material, tentatively titled Complications on a label based in Prague called , which will be forthcoming in May. He will tour Europe this coming summer. He is also working on a Black Box project in collaboration with ATLAS Professor Ellen Yi-Luen Do, and is doing the sound design for a dance performance featuring Helanius Wilkins, who will perform as part of the show MULTISCAPES at the Black Box on March 6 and 7.

Assistant Professor Stephanie Spray has been invited to present work at a retreat hosted by Science Sandbox at the National Academy of Sciences. She is also one of 16 directors invited to present nonfiction work in the 2020 Sundance Talent Forum and has been invited to CPH:DOX in Copenhagen to pitch her feature film, Patagonia Park. Her chapter for the Routledge Handbook for Ethnographic Film and Video will be published this April. She continues to work on both of her feature films: Edge of Time and Patagonia Park.

Instructor Andrew Young is currently in the review phase on his article “’Dark Tourism and Rwandan Media Industries: Promoting Nation and the Mythology of Memory” in the Journal of Genocide Research. He is teaching a new video game theory class this semester, which he’ll likely adapt into an article about a critical media practices approach to teaching game theory. Additionally, his research on Rwandan film and nationalism was accepted for presentation at the 2020 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, and his paper on Religion and Rwandan print media was accepted to the 2020 American Cultural Association/Popular Culture Association Conference.

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Researchers from labs across the country will come together on CU Boulder’s campus for a two-day symposium exploring how feminist approaches can be integrated into lab settings.

The “What Is a Feminist Lab?” symposium is free and open to the public and will take place April 17-18 in the university’s Norlin Library. Seats will be available on a first come, first served basis.

During the symposium, which will include both presentations and lab tours, speakers will survey the lab landscape and examine the proliferation of labs, drawing on intersectional feminist approaches. The event is meant to create a dialogue among lab leaders and collaborators from across the U.S. and Canada, as well as students and faculty from various interdisciplinary university labs.

Featured speakers include: Ashley Baccus-Clark, a molecular and cellular biologist and multidisciplinary artist based in New York; Ingrid Burrington, a writer and map maker based in New York;  Max Liboiron, an assistant professor of geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland; Elizabeth Losh, an associate professor of English and American studies at the College of William and Mary in Virginia; Tara McPherson, a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts; Marisa Parham, a professor of English at Amherst College in Massachusetts; Jacqueline Wernimont, an associate professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire; and Darren Wershler, an associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.

CU Boulder will also provide lab tours and presentations of the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship; the Media Archaeology Lab; the Unstable Design Lab; Nature, Environment, Science and Technology Studio for the Arts; and Blow Things Up Lab.

The symposium will take place on Wednesday, April 17, from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in CU Boulder’s Norlin Library, room N410. Lab tours will be led on Thursday, April 18, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m., also beginning in the Norlin Library, room N410, and then at each lab’s location starting at 10:30 a.m.

The event is co-organized by Professor and Director of Digital Scholarship for the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship Thea Lindquist, PhD Candidate and Curator of the Media Archaeology Lab Maya Livio, and Associate Professor and Director of the Media Archaeology Lab Lori Emerson. Major sponsors for the symposium are the Media Archaeology Lab and the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship. A list of and additional information can be found on the symposium’s .

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If you go:

What: “What is a Feminist Lab?” Symposium

Who: Free and open to the public, with seats available on a first come, first served basis

When: Wednesday, April 17, from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursday, April 18, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Where: Norlin Library Room N410 on April 17th and on April 18th beginning at Norlin Library N410, then at each lab’s location starting at 10:30am

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Casey Fiesler studies the intersection between law, ethics and social media.

Did you know researchers are reading and analyzing your tweets and Facebook posts in the name of science?

If so, how do you feel about it? If you feel unsettled, what would make you feel better?

What’s legal and what’s not in the age of big-data research? And even if it is legal, is it ethical?

These are some of the questions Casey Fiesler, an assistant professor in the Department of Information Science at CU Boulder, will explore as part of a multicenter, $3 million National Science Foundation grant announced this month.

The four-year, six-institution  (Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research) project aims to come up with guidance for researchers, policymakers and consumers around a burgeoning and at times controversial field so new it lacks widely accepted ethical standards.

“Thanks to the internet we now have this vast amount of information about human behavior that can help us answer very important questions,” says Fiesler, noting researchers mine everything from tweets to Instagram photos to publicly shared health data and comments on news articles. “This is great for science, but we have to make sure that the ways we go about answering these questions are ethical and take into account the privacy and ownership concerns of the people creating the data.”

Fiesler received more than $400,000 which she will use to assess user knowledge and perceptions of big-data research and its legal and ethical implications.

“As technology changes, ethical norms have to constantly evolve to keep up,” she says. “Just because data is easy to get doesn’t mean we should do whatever we like with it.”

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Story and photos by Carina Julig, junior (Jour)

This year’s CMCI Connect event included more than 300 students, all eager to make friends, meet professors and kick off their college careers. The annual event serves as a welcome for freshman students and others transferring to the college.

“Students do better when they feel like they’re entering a community,” said Cindy White, the associate dean of Undergraduate Curriculum and Programs who greeted students at the event. “CMCI Connect makes visible that we’re here because we need to know each other to be able to do this work.”

Student recruitment and outreach manager Shelby Javernick, who developed the event, said she hoped it would help students to start thinking of themselves as part of CMCI, and about what skills and values they can bring to the college.

Throughout the day, students participated in team building activities facilitated by fellow student team leaders. In the afternoon, CMCI professors arrived to meet students and judge activities. Rick Stevens, an associate professor of media studies, is excited to see how the new class progresses, and hoped the event "gave students an idea of what being a CMCI major would look like," he said.

This year’s freshman class will be the largest ever at CMCI, with 370 incoming students from 34 different states and six different countries. "This represents a 30 percent increase in class size," Javernick said.

At CMCI Connect, participation nearly doubled that of last year with students from each major present.

“I wouldn’t have known that there were so many different people within CMCI,” said Maddie Eye, a freshman Communication major. “I thought all of them would be people who wanted to be on stage like me, but a lot of them are very behind the scenes, too.”

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Students! We wanted to inform you of some opportunities to get involved within CMCI. Below is a list of student groups and their first meeting times and locations. They're open to all majors. Did we miss something? Email us.

• CMCI Student Government: Sept. 6 at 5 p.m., UMC 404
• Advertising Club: Sept. 6 at 6 p.m., HUMN 1B80
• Buffs Sports Live: Sept. 8 at 3:30 p.m., ATLAS 2B32
• PRSSA (Public Relations Student Society of America): Sept. 13 at 5p.m., Armory 218

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Sweaty palms, jitters, nerves, adrenaline—in college they happen whether you’re about to step into an arena, onto a stage or into a make-or-break final. How well you manage and prepare for those quiet, anxious moments often determines success during the main event.

That’s the theme of this year’s CU Boulder Pac-12 commercial, which airs during each Buffaloes football game and on the Pac-12 Network.

Read more at CMCI Now »

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Join us before the Homecoming Parade and Pep Rally on Friday, Oct. 27 for appetizers and drinks in the downtown Boulder studio of the Strategic Communication Design master’s program. Graduates of the Department of Communication and the former School of Journalism and Mass Communication are now CMCI alumni.

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