Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No.3/Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter 2018/2019 | Page 13

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Example 3: Remix Project
The development remix project that J.P. Singh undertook with his graduate students
at Georgetown University over the 2004–2012 period made the participants’ aware of
their agency and authorship even when translating existing materials and texts (Singh
2014). This multimodal project made the authors reflect on their own authority as cultural
translators while simultaneously seeking to humanize the subjects of their study.
The project started with immersions in fictional texts from the developing world for a
graduate seminar in “Technology, Culture and Development” in an attempt to understand
the social complexity of people’s lives. Students became aware that even when
providing a summary in class, their narration used their own words about a text found
elsewhere. This led to a digital project called “Cultural Identity Narratives” that were approximately
six to eight minutes in length. The students could not use their own words
but remixed existing literary and audio-visual representations in piecing together a narrative.
Here are examples:
http://vimeo.com/user11028897
Video 2. Kelsey Burns: Reading Lolita in Tehran, 2005
Hilla Meller: Father of Daughters, 2011
http://vimeo.com/38174563
Video 3. Patrick Scullin: Brasil Final Cut, 2012
The project addressed one of the fundamental challenges for international development,
namely that the way we represent the developing world in our conceptual imagination
is linked to the solutions and policies we propose (Singh 2017). Development thought
has come a long way since the postwar era when the developing world was imagined
as backward, belonging to the Third World, and in need of the kinds of solutions and
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