CAMRA


CAMRA @ Penn

CAMRA is an interdisciplinary collective of researchers, activists, artists, and educators committed to participatory, experimental media-making. We engage in projects and workshops that use multimodal representation to push knowledge production in new directions, as well as explore the boundaries between art, activism, and scholarship more critically. We develop productive partnerships with community organizations and scholars. In doing so, we organize supportive spaces for creating and showcasing new work, as well as critically examine how technology is changing teaching and learning in higher education. CAMRA fosters interdisciplinary collaboration though a diverse network of graduate and undergraduate students, media-makers, scholars, activists, artists, and educators within and beyond the University of Pennsylvania, with the School of Arts and Sciences, Law School, Annenberg School for Communication, and Graduate School of Education as official affiliates. Our aim is to support cutting-edge research and pedagogies, with an explicit focus on providing practical guidelines for evaluation and creating platforms for new work to be showcased and supported. CAMRA has sustained a particular interest and investment in critical ethnographic practices, from both within Anthropology and beyond, and seeks to explore multimodal possibilities for transformative approaches to ethnographic work. 


Our Work

As an organization, we have four major streams of activity:

  • We engage in research, projects and workshops that use multimodal representation to push knowledge production in new directions. The primary structure for these community activities is CAMRA Labs.
  • We organize supportive spaces for creating and showcasing new work, such as the Screening Scholarship Media Festival. This festival is our annual conference that invites artists, activists, and scholars from both within and outside of the US. to submit their multimodal products and share in a vital community building space.  
  • We mentor younger students, researchers, and artists to develop their own multimodal projects through the CAMRA Fellows Program.
  • We develop productive partnerships with community organizations and scholars.

To learn more about our exciting initiatives and projects, explore the CAMRA website


Primary Supervising Faculty from Anthropology

Deborah A. Thomas:
Deborah.thomas@sas.upenn.edu

John L. Jackson Jr.
jjackson@upenn.edu