Five adventurous students received fellowships this year to showcase their multimedia projects addressing international issues on the Global Conversation, a blog launched by the Watson Institute for International Studies two years ago. Over winter break, five students were sponsored as AT&T New Media Fellows, each receiving $1,500 in addition to audio and video equipment to document their work and upload it to the site.
Since the Watson Institute launched the blog as an outlet for students to share their work and experiences abroad with the Brown community, AT&T has sponsored 35 New Media Fellows to go abroad and work on a variety of international projects.
Kai Herng Loh '14, associate new media producer for the blog and one of this year's recipients, traveled to China over break to study the country's capacity to innovate as it vies to become even more dominant in global markets. Loh said he wanted to challenge the idea portrayed in American media that China "is not really capable of producing innovation."
Loh created a video documentary counteracting the media's portrayal, though he added that the documentary will not be as thorough as he hoped because "it was hard to get higher-level government officials to go on video," he said.
The blog is like "Facebook with a purpose," said Karen Lynch, editor of the Global Conversation. "It gives Brown students an opportunity to showcase some of the great work that they are doing — otherwise it might just sit there on their laptops," Lynch said. "And it also helps to bring alumni back in connection with Brown in the context of international matters."
Nicholas Carter '11.5 is exploring how the street music of Cartagena, Colombia conveys the history of the city's Afro-Colombians and the city's different social, cultural and political processes.
"I'm trying to discover what life is like here and how music and dance function in these public spaces and also how they give meaning to the musicians, dancers and people passing through," said Carter, who has plans to stay in Cartagena for a few more months and hopes to find a job in the city.
Brigitta Greene '12, former deputy managing editor at The Herald, investigated the problems surrounding hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
"The price of oil reached a high enough level that more expensive drilling practices that have been known but (are) not economical to use are now worth it," Greene said.
Tala Worrell '14 plans to create a mini-documentary to shed light on the recent revolution in Egypt through her own family's experiences, and Kaori Ogawa '12 will produce a photo documentary on France's recent assimilatory immigration policy, according to the blog's website.
The 2012 New Media Fellows have shared information about their projects on the blog, but the Global Conversation website is becoming more popular among other members of the Brown community. Anybody with a brown.edu email address can post on the site, which allows its users to upload audio and video content. The site is currently on track to reach a milestone 100,000 hits in March, according to Lynch.
The number of site visits in November 2010 more than doubled by February 2011 and then doubled again by November 2011, according to Lynch. She added that plans are in the works to revamp the website to make it more user-friendly.
"Most of the content was coming from the fellows, but increasingly we've just seen people registering on the site and sharing things," Loh said.
"It gives all these projects that are being done some value in the sense that it frames that all as acting as contributions to a larger discussion," Carter said.
"Taking mostly unconventional stories from all around the world and presenting them together is something that can really make people aware of the variety of stories that there are and the diversity of human experiences," he added.
Applications for summer fellowships are due Feb. 27, Lynch said.
