apc.au blog

The Karen community, for whom 2009 is ancient history, will celebrate the year 2748 this December. Australia is host to a growing number of Karen who arrived here as refugees having fled their homelands in Burma.

In 2007, or rather, 2746, we began working with the Melbourne based Cultural Development Network on an internet video production series, Homelands, for young people from the Karen and Sudanese communities. The idea is to co-produce video pieces discussing their perceptions of homeland with other young people from Karen and Sudanese communities abroad, and where possible, those still living in refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border and / or Kenya and the Southern Sudan respectively.

This afternoon I worked with a group of Karen young people who have formed a web development team to start the work of producing a site that will support, develop and promote collaborative video production amongst themselves and young Karen abroad.

They arrived with a draft plan for their website, however it had not included any scope for supporting the video production project. What it did provide though, was a clear outline of information flows that would inform, guide and promote the project. It just needed the Homelands components added.

I showed them through Vibewire, SlumTV and EngageMedia. As I talked through each of these projects Homelands Project Officer, Kirsty Baird, logged onto a chat room on karen.org and found someone involved with the Karen community in California who not only makes videos but was keen to gather up stills and videos from Karen living there. The pieces were starting to fall into place.

Curiously, Vibewire seemed less representative of an online community of young creative people than I recall. EngageMedia will no doubt become the host platform for Homeland videos and SlumTV demonstrates what is possible when a clear framework is provided up front! SlumTV make no bones about what they do. They teach kids in slums how to make videos and screen them.

The next step was to ensure we could get a website up and running quickly – a site that would be easy to use, a site that supported not only the Karen’s vision, but a collaborative environment from which videos can be produced from. I showed them through WordPress and got their lead web person, Friday, to set up a free WordPress blog and Karen TV was born! It is but a humble beginning…

By the end of the workshop we had everyone signed up as contributors. We covered some basic publishing techniques in WordPress, found a design template everyone was happy with and put together a small production team to re-design a header image.

It was a terrific outcome.

We have momentum!

I left the Melbourne Multicultural Hub, wandered up to a Korean grocery store, picked up some supplies for dinner and walked home in the rain. 

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Photo: A Karen child from the village of Pilokkhi in Thailand near the Myanmar border. By Brian Adler, Public Domain, Wikipedia.

Home Lands is a recipient of an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant. apc.au will be involved in a component of the research being one of the partners of the application to the ARC. We are very proud to be involved in this project and to have been part of a successful ARC process.

What is Home Lands?

Home Lands is an internet television project made with entry level technical resources that connects refugee young people living in separated communities. Home Lands is underpinned by the premise that refugee youth resettlement is more successful if identification, communication and engagement is maintained with home communities.

Many young refugees struggle to develop positive cultural identities. The Home Lands project will explore the role that information and communication technologies (ICTs) can play in connecting young refugees to their diasporic communities and demonstrate how this can assist them in developing positive social and cultural identities.

How will it work?

Separated production teams collaborate towards the creation of regular internet television programs that are then broadcast to communities at either end of this production spectrum and to other community members around the world. Preliminary stages of the project will see the use of Engage Media’s video distribution software and Creative Commons licensing, which may well form the basis of a dedicated media delivery platform in the future.

What has Home Lands done?

Over 2008, the Home Lands project has been in a research and development  phase, through funding from the City of Melbourne’s Community Cultural Development Program and VicHealth (Victoria’s peak health promotion body). The Home Lands project has recently been funded over three years by the Australian Research Council and will continue to receive funding from the City of Melbourne throughout this time. Substantial research on the impact of ICTs on refugee/transnational identities will be undertaken by Dr Sandy Gifford at the Refugee Health Research Centre, La Trobe University, as part of the project.

A Home Lands future and partnerships

So far, work has been undertaken with Karen (Burmese) and Sudanese young people in Melbourne and Karen young people on the Thai-Burma border. We are seeking additional funding to support the on-going activities and are looking for international partnerships to support the international aspects of the project’s development over the next three years – 2009-2011 – in Thailand, Southern Sudan, Egypt and other Diaspora locations which could include Europe/USA/UK. Future phases of the project will see the introduction of other communities including Iraqi and Somali.

It is the intention of the Home Lands project that it becomes a sustainable resource to provide for on-going connection between separated communities around the world.