Roomful Project: The Fab Collab

The Fab Collab - a room full of possibilities
https://share.roomful.co/room/f8d9f79xn9wtmx

Hello visitors! Welcome to ‘the Fab Collab’. I'm Emma - founder of the organization, and believer in all sad, happy, sweet and human things. If you asked me to describe our community in a sentence, I'd say we are committed to revealing and rectifying systemic inequalities; our work begins by identifying practices that reinforce unequal distributions of power in our local environments. At present, our collective is comprised of passionate people that contribute, through their own methods and according to their own beliefs, to creating new ways of being in the world.

I began work in community organizing in high school [as a member of YAADA[1] and GSA[2]], though I gained invaluable experience working with two other women to build 'TOPICS dealing with dating violence' as a viable, student-lead community organization at Clark University. As a co-founder of TOPICS [explain acronym], I was closely involved with recruiting and training new members, as well as planning and executing presentations explaining the cycle of domestic violence to (mostly) young adults. These community outreach events took place both within and outside of the Clark community, extending to high schools and NGO's in the greater Worcester area. Additionally, some of us spoke directly with survivors of domestic violence and dating abuse as volunteer counselors.

Through counseling, I learned that perhaps one of the most important tools we have at our disposal is our ability to listen to each other. Importantly - listening and hearing are two different modes; while hearing uses aural sense perception to pick up sounds, listening involves sensing, understanding, evaluating, and responding. This means not only that hearing sounds doesn't necessarily mean we are listening, but also that deaf community members can and do listen attentively in their own ways. Since college, I have continued to utilize and hone the skills that I began to develop as a co-founder of TOPICS dealing with dating violence. Simultaneously, social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter have become increasingly dominant in American popular culture.

The 'Fab Collab' grapples with the varied ways that social network sites have shaped and are shaping social relations nationally and abroad. This particular space is organized as an interview gallery. The idea is that potential employees will be invited into the room and encouraged to engage with the varied forms of content as they navigate the space. At points throughout the exhibit, visitors are invited to share their thoughts and feelings about the objects they encounter. I have also 'built-in' two places to engage with others on the way out. the first is a place to exchange information with other interviewees, so that connections made on site may continue. The second is a place to have a face-t0-face interview with a current employee on site. In this hypothetical realm, the hiring team would then collect the sum of these materials (including the application, interviewees' feedback on the content they encountered, summaries of and feelings about the FTF conversation, etc.) in order to make the most informed choice about who to bring "on board."

Just as roomful is in its beta stage, so is the budding idea for this organization. I currently study how content creators on social network sites use the affordances of digital technologies to challenge hegemonic structures of dominance. Inside academia, the people whose texts I choose to consider are those whose opinions and ideas and emotions and affiliations are "counter to" a dominant hegemonic order. Since these people are most often video bloggers, they are also digital content creators. The monikor 'content creator' refers to people that create digital content, and is often replaced with 'content producer.' Paid content producers (Burgess & Green, 2009) that double as consumers on certain platforms are referred to in some fields as “prosumers,” as this convergence of the terms producer and consumer typically denotes people who assume both roles at once. Still, it can’t be argued that all members of the counterpublics that I study are prosumers, since not all content creators are paid directly by the platforms (or by the advertisers on those platforms). Here, hired employees have become producers for the Collab before they even sign their W-2 –as a part of the hiring process. In other words, all eventual employees receive a sign-on bonus for allowing us to archive their responses. This enables us to understand how the introduction of new team members might shift and transform our initiatives, recalibrating to different focal points as new perspectives are introduced. 

Our shared passion for teaching and research is a by-product of our passion for creating inclusive environments that facilitate connections among and between different social groups. We actively work to enact empathy, connectedness, open-mindedness, and critical discernment in both our professional and personal lives. In a world full of text messages, persistent notifications, and countless virtual extensions of space, the benefits of place-based human engagement are often overshadowed by immediate access and instant gratification. This virtual exhibit serves a first step in imagining what a job outside of academia might look like for myself and a crew of likeminded others. 

We have so much to learn from each other. We believe that, if we can pause for long enough to listen, there are no limits to what humans – together – can imagine.

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My focus within communication converges in the following areas:

 

A)    Critical Cultural Studies

B)    Platform Studies

C)    American [Counter] Publics

 Regardless of whether or not I choose to pursue a tenure track position, I hope to speak beyond academia about my findings, as part of the effort to create a more fair and just global environment.

[1] Young Adults Against Dating Abuse

[2] Gay-Straight Alliance – a title that is certainly dated now. I attended high school from   2000 -2004.