While learning about human migration, Brock Sociology and Critical Criminology students recently participated in a collaborative project that saw them connecting with peers across the U.S. border.

The semester-long initiative culminated in a hybrid screening last week, where students in Brock Assistant Professor Julie Ham’s course on Human Migration in a Globalized World shared participatory media projects with students in Assistant Professor Vivian Wenli Lin’s Women’s Migration in Media course at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Calif.

Ham and Lin, who previously worked together on a video project giving voice to migrant domestic workers, asylum seekers and members of ethnic minority communities in Hong Kong, decided to try what Ham describes as a “transnational pedagogical innovation” by co-teaching their respective classes, with Ham lecturing on asylum seekers, refugees and human trafficking while Lin covered the ethics of storytelling, narratives of migration and visual methodologies.

Students worked on creative media projects within their classes while also participating in interdisciplinary working groups where peers from both classes could share and discuss raw footage, course material and feedback.

The final screening was held simultaneously in St. Catharines and L.A. on Wednesday, Dec. 6, and featured short films as well as excerpts from longer films on topics ranging from deeply personal family stories to explorations of how migration relates to community, intersectionality and labour.

“One of the underlying themes of migration, memory and family — and how stories about migration are shared within families — was very moving to see,” says Ham. “We also had videos that looked at experiences and perspectives of international students, and oftentimes what was shared were fair, valid and quite astute critiques of how international students are positioned in Canadian academia — how the discourse situates international students compared to the reality of being an international student.”

Third-year Sociology student Harishan Jeyaseelan says it was exciting to work with peers at Occidental College and to provide a platform for those who have felt the impacts of migration first-hand.

Third-year Sociology student Harishan Jeyaseelan worked independently on a documentary featuring his mother’s story.

“My video was a collaboration with my mother discussing the traumatic experiences she faced in the Sri Lankan massacres of the 1980s,” he says. “Working on the project really demonstrated how mass media narratives manufactured by a documentarian may vastly differ from true immigrant narratives where we actually collaborate with the migrants we interview in selecting what info they feel would be best to represent themselves.”

Third-year Sociology co-op student Sadie Boon and third-year Critical Criminology major Karlie Kennedy were part of a group that produced a film exploring the experiences of international students at Brock.

Kennedy says the project provided a practical application of course concepts and a lot of insight on personal experiences.

“In our project, our main intention was to showcase the way that international students face marginalization in various aspects of everyday life, which may include things such as academic challenges, language barriers, financial struggles or challenges related to “Canadianization,” as well as the difficulty of finding oneself in an unfamiliar environment,” she says. “The project provided a nuanced, real-world perspective that complemented and enriched our theoretical knowledge.”

Like Jeyaseelan, Boon was struck by the importance of storytelling in understanding the complexity of issues related to migration.

“The participatory video project illuminated the empowering essence of storytelling, creating a safe space for migrants to share their narratives, dismantle societal stereotypes and highlight the importance of diversity,” she says. “Delving into these narratives allowed me to appreciate the richness of perspectives and also offered a unique opportunity to tap into the creative expressions of my classmates and peers.”