2014 Allied Media Conference in Detroit

Join Metropolarity & network at this year’s The Allied Media Conference, a collaborative laboratory of media-based organizing strategies for transforming our world, held every Summer in Detroit!

DID U KNOW? METROPOLARITY PRESENTS A SCI-FI FOCUSED PROGRAMMING TRACK THIS YEAR!

Liberation Technologies: Sci-Fi for World Building & Survival

The post-apocalypse is here and real, where ancient and varied modes of survival and technology have been erased in the name of Empire and Progress. What do we do when access to memory/the past is standardized? This track explores how people at the margins can remix, rewire, and revive emancipatory technologies such as storytelling, world-building, magic, sci-fi and speculation to envision and conjure narratives of power and joy. Through engagement with tools like portals and time-travel, we will develop strategies to manifest new/ancient narratives into reality. We will envision a world that has happened, is happening, and will happen. We hope that travelers will walk away with the courage to embody the power of fiction and visioning in healing personal and historical trauma and disenfranchisement. We want to create and share multifaceted inclusive networks that emerge our bodies from isolation and oppressive paradigms to keep our souls alive.

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ABOUT THE AMC

CREATE
At the AMC, we understand media as any way in which we communicate with the world, from zines to breakdancing, to designing neighborhood-based communications infrastructure. We share and create media that exposes, investigates, heals, builds confidence and radical hope, incites dialogue and debate. We demystify technology, not only learning how to use it, but how to design and build our own. In doing so, we redefine technology’s role and impact in our lives. The AMC creates learning environments for all ages and skill levels, including hands-on workshops, strategy sessions, presentations and performances.

CONNECT
The AMC is a network of networks – social justice organizers, community technologists, transformative artists, educators, entrepreneurs, and many others — all using media in innovative ways. Some of these networks sprout from the conference, grow over the course of the year then reconvene in Detroit larger and healthier. Others use the AMC as an annual point of convergence and a space to forge new relationships. Through cycles of participatory investigation and experimentation, our networks continue to grow, generating new theories and practices of media-based organizing.

TRANSFORM
As our networks grow, so does our capacity to take collective actions to transform our world. At the AMC, we develop new leaders and new forms of leadership, design new methods of problem-solving, cultivate the visions of our communities and build our power to make those visions real.

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Browse the 2014 Tracks, Practice Spaces, and Network Gatherings that make up the AMC here!

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REGISTER TO ATTEND! ／／／　FIND HOUSING, RIDESHARES, CHILDCARE & ACCESSIBILITY HERE

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Allied Media Projects Network Principles

We are making an honest attempt to solve the most significant problems of our day.

We are building a network of people and organizations that are developing long-term solutions based on the immediate confrontation of our most pressing problems.

Wherever there is a problem, there are already people acting on the problem in some fashion. Understanding those actions is the starting point for developing effective strategies to resolve the problem, so we focus on the solutions, not the problems.

We emphasize our own power and legitimacy.

We presume our power, not our powerlessness.

We spend more time building than attacking.

We focus on strategies rather than issues.

The strongest solutions happen through the process, not in a moment at the end of the process.

The most effective strategies for us are the ones that work in situations of scarce resources and intersecting systems of oppression because those solutions tend to be the most holistic and sustainable.

Place is important. For the AMC, Detroit is important as a source of innovative, collaborative, low-resource solutions. Detroit gives the conference a sense of place, just as each of the conference participants bring their own sense of place with them to the conference.

We encourage people to engage with their whole selves, not just with one part of their identity.

We begin by listening.