The Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media presented its second annual panel discussion on the intersection of gender, media and human rights March 6 at Columbia College of Chicago’s Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash. Laura Washington moderated a group of four panelists: Cheryl Corley, a Chicago-based reporter for National Public Radio; Antjie Korg, a writer and journalist from South Africa; Silvia Malagrino, a Chicago-based media artist; and Joe Richman, a Chicago-based producer of public radio’s Radio Diaries.
In her opening comments, Jane Saks, the institute’s executive director, said that seeing the intersection between gender, media and human rights allows for ‘new models’ of investigation. The four panelists spoke about, and played excerpts from, stories and recordings where there had been personal connections between themselves and their subjects. For one radio story, Corley went into the New Orleans house of a Katrina refugee and described the damage while the woman listened in Chicago where she had relocated. Malagrino’s film Burnt Oranges is about her attempt to find out what had happened to friends who’d become part of the ‘lost generation’ during Argentina’s military repression in the 1970s. Richman worked closely with Thembi Ngubane, a young South African with AIDS, who recorded her everyday life with the disease for radio. Korg interviewed Deborah Matshoba, a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa, about her experience of torture in the apartheid era. The moderated discussion focused on issues of emotional involvement between subjects and reporters/artists; the line between advocacy and documentation; and how the subject matter might affect the narrative and visual techniques used.
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The panel at Columbia’s discussion on gender, media and human rights. Back row (from left) : Antjie Korg, Cheryl Corley and Joe Richman. Front row (from left) : Jane Saks, Silvia Malagrino and Laura Washington. Photo by Tracy Baim