I’ve had a pretty hectic few months of it…there are a few really interesting projects happening at the moment and each of them presents really unique and often complicated challenges.
One of those projects is Trans Media Action. We’re investigating ways to encourage the media to represent trans issues more fairly and accurately and, over the next few months, On Road Media will be supporting Trans Media Watch to come up with some innovative ways to do this.
One of our activities will take the form of a “social innovation camp”. (For those of you who don’t know what a social innovation camp is, you can find out more here.) These events bring people from different backgrounds together to find solutions to difficult problems. In this case, we’ll be bringing tech people, media professionals and transgender people together to ask the question; how can we improve how transgender people are portrayed in the media? So our very own “Trans Media Camp” will be held at Channel 4 on January 13th 2011.
We had our first planning meeting for the camp last week at City University which consisted of a day-long workshop to break down some of the issues and brainstorm some of the areas we might ask people to address on the day. For some of Trans Media Watch, chatting about the prejudice, misunderstandings and abuses trans people face felt like we were going over old ground. It certainly feels like we’ve been discussing these problems for a long time now, which doesn’t get any easier. But in order to involve more and more people in this story, we need to talk about this stuff until we’re blue in the face!
After we scoped out the problems, we chatted about some solutions and what success might look like and then started to draw up a guest list for the event. We’ll be sharing more about our plans in the coming weeks but please get in touch with us if you want to help or contribute.
Thanks!
