Imagerizing social resilience: making films on resilient communities and resiliencing communities in Taiwan

Course description:
Following the definition of UN SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), “a Resilient Community is a city, town or neighbourhood that reduces its vulnerability to dramatic change or extreme events and responds creatively to economic, social and environmental change in order to increase its long-term sustainability,” this practicum studio intends to look into resilient communities in Taiwan via the tool of videographic filming. But we will not adopt a fixed standard to evaluate which communities may by qualified as resilient paradigms or if the community members are knowledgeable about the resilient mode of practices. We may even borrow the concept of social resiliencing to identify certain characteristics of resiliecing communities that see “crisis as an ever changing, emergent, dynamic phenomenon” and initiate collective attempts at becoming communities of burgeoning resilience.

Besides learning from the experiences of the communities under the resilient category, this studio is also interested in exploring the cases of the place-making experiments and practices from the bottom up. To some degree, place-making exemplifies a creative way of self-empowerment, self-organizing, and co-creation to tackle on community issues collectively and cooperatively, thus conduces to strengthening the community resilience. In the past few decades after the lifting of martial law, many urban and rural communities in Taiwan have adopted the place-making approaches to reaffirm place identity and social resilience via a series of community empowerment projects. Particularly in the wake of 921 Earthquake of 1999, some of these projects demonstrated the grassroots endeavors of regenerating from the aftermath of disasters and morphing from vulnerability to sustainability.

To further illustrate the social mechanism and spatial transformation of the resilient communities, the methods of imagery narrative will be employed to tell the community stories through the lens, perspectives, and cuts of videography. Filming of the chosen communities is both the creative process of the collaborators and the documentation of community evolution at a specific time. Each participating student is required to make a film on resilient community, and the outcomes will also serve as the guides of a virtual field trip arranged by the Urban Studies Programme course of CUHK (Chinese University Hong Kong).

Virtual Guide to Resilient Communities。此課程將與香港中文大學的都市研究課程跨域合作，透過影片拍攝與製作，以影像敘事方法再現台灣一些藉由社區和社群的日常自我培力，因而在面對災害、疫情、或環境衝擊時得以因應或逐步回復的韌性社區。影片將會上中英字幕，作為與中大師生視訊交流及導覽的媒介。影片數量將視修課人數而定，預計拍攝3-5處韌性社區，但不侷限於都會區。學生透過影片拍攝與社區交陪，田野工作必須紮實，更需要花時間與在地居民或利害相關人培養信任關係。影片成果在被拍攝者觀看後並認同的前提下，預計將放上社群網站平台公開放映。