Sometimes the stars of the Global Citizens stream align so nicely. This is one of those times. This past week in both Art Studies, Sociology and to an extent, Geography, have explored multiple facets of racial discrimination, in literature, news and day-to-day, mundane actions. We see, sociologically speaking the intersectionality of discrimination of race, class and gender. In Art Studies, we’ve read Jiwani ans Young’s Missing and Murdered Women, an article that addresses the lack of social agency and “space” for self-representation given to the female often non-white sex workers of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. They explore what many facets of news and cultural media discount, which is “how race, class, and sexuality intersect and interlock to sustain hegemonic power (900).” Which to say, in television programs and movies like Beat, Through a Blue Lens, and their contemporaries, Scared Straight, Beyond Scared Straight, and Intervention fall under similar frames that address addiction and crime isolated from social factors that do not place blame on the addicts, sex workers and criminals themselves.

In Through a Blue Lens, the police force of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side document their relationships with multiple (and some homeless) drug addicts who occupy the area. While it may appear that this film is an outlet for addict representation, the “kind” of addicts represented are quite similar in their compliance with the police officers and their shame about the drugs, two things that serve the “save the kids” agenda of the officers making the film and not the histories of these people. What’s worse, the film fails to address addicts who are not white, and thus suffer an even more complex “moral and racialized economy of representations,” or in this case, none at all.

Now take Intervention, an American documentary program that weekly chronicles the lives of addicts and their eventual “interventions,” as a means of allowing them redemption. Despite varying addictions and circumstances, the formula of each episode does not leave much room for the addict to heal and get sober aside from being sent to the rehabilitation center. And most of them are white, too. It’s unfair. Or Scared Straight and the even more abrasive Beyond Scared Straight, meant to instill fear in children to avoid criminal behaviors while ignoring the various patterns and institutional pillars of discrimination and prejudice that catalyze deviant behavior. In many cases, these become sites of consumption instead of spaces of representation and education. These shows lack the insight, or simply ignore the deeper complexities that disadvantage people and reflect badly on their media identities. If they are not challenged and redefined, if not eradicated, stigmas like these will remain invisible, but undeniably present.

As a class, and to a larger extent as a CAP stream, we’ve been studying the TRC and its effects since the beginning of the school year, when we didn’t even know how to analyze abstractions and mediate scholarly voices. Now six months of study later, it takes on a more complex and interrelated context. Many of you revisited the TRC through the Museum of Anthropology exhibit, making new connections or acknowledging concepts, constraints and ideas you were not aware of before. Chany explored how the TRC can serve as a platform for Aboriginal peoples to override their “victim” identities and instead emphasize “their bravery and perseverance through the bad hand they were dealt.” She also made a valid point about many places, like the United States, continuing to silence and deny these voices.

Upon further examination, much of what our class wrote about had to do with the relationship between an archive or a space of public memory and the archivist. Makoto shed light on the online narrative database StoryCorp, which while claiming universality, is in fact structured to favor the narratives of veterans and more traditional stories. Mana wrote about the cultural importance of historical education, in this case of how Japanese students are denied the knowledge of their nation’s recent past. Even the Olympics, which are not commonly seen as a national archive, or a preserved record of national pride and ability, were related to the silencing of queer voices by Meredith.

What is being reiterated is a heightened awareness of the ethics of representation, and recognition of problematic power dynamics that go into archived memory, events and voices. Niklas had plenty to say about that in his blot concerning last week’s lantern festival. What I also see is a flexibility in thinking of what can be considered an archive, who have the ability to be an archivist, as well as the possibility of deviation from intent.