Representing Religion was inspired by paradigms in media anthropology, community art, and participatory media initiatives. The following terms from these disciplines ground our approach to representation in dialogue and care.
Creative Collaboration: A relationship between two or more people with a common purpose of creating new objects through certain ideas and a shared understanding of something new and a common goal. Essentially, it means collectively working together to solve a problem in an innovative way or developing new ideas.
Cross-Cultural Knowledge Production: The process of building intercultural dialogue that considers the cultural processes from which both participants are from. In doing so, we learn not only about other cultural perspectives but become more aware of how our culture consciously (and unconsciously) influences our perspective—producing understanding of others and ourselves in the process.
Culture: A set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared. Together, they form an all-encompassing, integrated whole that binds people together and shapes their worldviews and lifeways.
Ethnomusicology: The study of music in its social and cultural contexts. Ethnomusicologists examine music as a social process in order to understand not only what music is but what it means to its practitioners and audiences.
Media Anthropology: Offers a lens to analyze media as a social practice that informs imaginaries and shapes political, cultural, and social identities and as embodied forms of inclusion, exclusion, and manipulation by social actors. Media anthropology acknowledges that culture is embedded in the production, practice, and consumption of media.
Media Kit: An overview, mission statement, educational resources, or learning materials, along with a potential point of contact.
Narrative Capital: Removing a narrative from its cultural context in order to commodify it, aka “profiting from someone’s story.”
Participatory Media: Refers to the active and inclusive involvement of the community being represented within media initiatives that emphasize self-determination, dialogue, and a focus on the process – rather than just the outcome—of communication.
Politics of Representation: Refers to the struggle in society over the meaning of images and depictions in a specific culture. It reveals the power relations and power structures in our society that determine (consciously and unconsciously) which representations are included, excluded, and distorted for a pre-imagined audience.
Reflexivity: A term typically associated with qualitative research but has become widely acknowledged as a crucial tool for ethical representation in media production. Reflexivity is the process of reflecting on yourself as the researcher (or creator), to provide more effective and impartial analysis. It involves examining and consciously acknowledging the assumptions and preconceptions you bring into the research that therefore shape the outcome. None of us are detached, objective observers. We are all human beings who hold opinions and pre-formulated ideas, based on our experiences and what we have been exposed to in our lives.
Reciprocity: Mutual exchange of privileges.
Scientific Colonialism: A critique of the relationship to cultural research in which knowledge, experiences, stories, and practices are mined from a cultural community of interest to write books, establish careers, and advance financially without giving anything to the community from which the resources came.
Self-Representation: To speak on behalf of one’s self and community. Representations by the community for the community. Impacts of the representation will also impact the identity of the creator.
Self-Representational Media: Any media produced by and for the community it represents—Important because the authority of lived experience and cultural protocols are embedded within the production.
Spokesperson Effect: One person speaking on behalf of an entire community. This is problematic for underrepresented communities, especially, because it suggests that one person’s experience is universal and leaves very little room for intersectionality and nuance of lived experience.
Tokenism: The policy or practice of making only a symbolic effort.
Visual Culture and Communication: The tangible, or visible, expressions by a people, a state or a civilization, and collectively describes the characteristics of that body as a whole. It is the visual communication of the everyday experience including clothing, food, photographs, advertising, landscape, movies, paintings, etc. Visual culture is a frame to analyze anything within a culture that communicates through visual means to assess the current ideologies, social practices, economic structures, and power dynamics of its producers and audiences.
Visual Sovereignty: The power of self-representing through mass media to assert more imaginative renderings of Native American intellectual and cultural paradigms. It is speaking back to static representations of Native communities such as the “vanishing Indian” by asserting complex, nuanced, and contemporary images to claim space both visually—aesthetics in media—and culturally through recognition of Native peoples as dynamic and ever-evolving the same way everyone else is.
- Additionally, visual sovereignty is a framework for consideration of who has the right to use someone or someone’s culture to convey a story visually.