Summer Research Dispatches: Yairamaren Roman Maldonado on Humanizing Deportation
We were thrilled to offer six BCNM graduate students stipends to pursue their research over the summer of 2017. Below, Yairamaren Roman Maldonado shares how she collaborated with the UC Davis Digital Storytelling project: Humanizing Deportation.
This summer I used my BCNM award to collaborate on UC Davis' digital storytelling project Humanizing Deportation. I headed down to Tijuana with a team of 10 graduate students and principal investigator Robert Irwin. We also worked with team members from Colegio de la Frontera Norte. During our fieldwork we met with participants that had been deported and came from different paths of life. I had the opportunity to work on a story by a collaborator who was also a poet. This collaboration was really powerful because it helped me explore one of my main scholarly interests regarding the intersections of the digital and the literary since the storyteller chose to recite his poetry rather than writing a narrative. Through my collaboration with Tom, I was able to reflect on how the methodology of digital storytelling can rescue literary material that might otherwise remain inaccessible. The project as a whole seeks to create an archive with that exact purpose with regards to the human experience of deportation. It was a great experience to understand the nuances of the collaborative nature of a digital storytelling project and see the tangible outcomes that come from intense fieldwork. Upon return to Berkeley I have been helping with the post-production of videos by other participants and with the management of uploading materials to the web page. The project’s website has already gathered approximately thirty stories and the team is expecting to create an archive of over fifty stories. We hope you check it out yourself here!