Denver Lecture

February 28, 2008

Tomorrow morning I am off to Denver, Colorado for a talk to Lawrence alums. My talk is titled "Islam in America: A View of Dearborn, Michigan." It will draw on my trip to Dearborn over the summer, focusing on two major mosques where I conducted interviews: the Dearborn Mosque and the Islamic Center of America. My ideas are more fully developed in my short documentary (coming soon to the website, I hope!).. but this talk will let me spin off some of this material into a different form.

The talk is most exciting because of the opportunity to make use of a multi-media approach. The meat of my talk will be my own words, but at various points I will project some video clips of scenes in Dearborn or bits of interview. When your point depends upon a sense of physical context and location, it gets hard to verbally describe a scene effectively. I find it is more and more true that for me to convey my ideas I need to show images and maps.

I think often about the possibility of a multimedia essay.. not necessarily delivered in person, but mixing words and images in an interpretive mode. My YouTube videos represent one approach to this, but maybe this weekend excursion and talk represents a second approach to the same goal?