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The Changing Cultures of Regent Park
By Dawar Naeem
Dawar is Community Journalist with RPTV Focus Media Arts Centre
The Changing Culture of Regent Park is a unique and creative course collaboration with Focus Media Arts Centre and the University of Toronto. Focus Media Arts Centre is a not-for-profit organization that counters negative stereotypes about Toronto’s Regent Park community and provides media literacy and production training for youth living in the area.
The Changing Cultures of Regent Park is a community-engaged learning course. Each week, University of Toronto students, visit Focus Media Arts Centre in Regent Park, to work together, envision and produce a media project addressing a specific issue in Regent Park, culminating in a final public exhibition. This Course is taught by Aditi Mehta, an assistant professor in the Urban Studies Program at the University of Toronto and was also a community-engaged learning faculty fellow at the Centre for Community Partnerships. Aditi Mehta completed her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where she was awarded the department’s most outstanding dissertation prize for her investigation of the politics of community media in post-disaster cities. She was also awarded the Institute’s highest public service award for co-designing MIT’s first course located inside a prison, and for co-publishing scholarly works related to the course innovations.
In 2022, The Course participants from the Regent Park community and the students from UofT were put in to three groups.
1. Urban Eyes
2. Regent Park Radio Shack
3. Dawn In Regent Park
Each group was made up of Regent Park Residents and UofT students so they can work collaboratively and learn from each other.
The Regent Park residents and the students at the University of Toronto presented their final projects in a multi-media exhibition at The Daniels Spectrum in Regent Park, home of Focus Media Arts Centre. To know more about the project, visit the course website - https://www.uoftxrpfocus.com
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FOCUS Media Arts Centre (FOCUS) is a not-for-profit organization that was established in 1990 to counter negative media stereotypes of low income communities and provide relevant information to residents living in the Regent Park area and surrounding communities.
We seek to empower marginalized individuals and under represented communities to have a voice, through the use of professional training, mentorships and participatory based media practices that enable the sharing of stories, experiences and perspectives on relevant matters and issues. In brief our mandate is to empower marginalized individuals and under-serviced communities to have a voice and tell their own stories.
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