Award-Winning Filmmaker 🏆 Digital Media Researcher 🎓 (DEI) Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Activist ⚖️ Social Media Marketer 📱 Communication & Culture Advocate 🗣️ MFA Film & Television 🎥 PhD Texts & Technology 💻
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Christopher Odom has long been drawn to the significance of visual stories. Their power to influence people and enact social change through digital mediums captivated him and led him to pursue a PhD in Texts and Technology here at UCF. He believes that digital stories may hold the key to making a difference in our society and raising awareness about issues that might otherwise be ignored. “What someone feels through the power of imagery and story might inspire them, over time, to change the world,” he says.
Fourteen students from across the university will serve on UCF’s first Graduate Student Advisory Council beginning this month.
The students were selected from a pool of more than 150 applicants and represent all colleges across the university, including UCF Online, who are attending part-time or full-time. They will serve for one year and work directly with the Dean of the College of Graduate Studies Elizabeth Klonoff.
“The overwhelming response to our call for volunteers demonstrates our students care about creating a supportive environment,” Klonoff says. “I look forward to working with them to build a community where none of our graduates feel invisible and instead are a critical part of UCF’s community fabric.”
The council members will share experiences, identify, and suggest solutions to challenges unique to graduate students and make recommendations to the college to build a welcoming and inclusive graduate community.
Candidates must have a minimum GPA of 3.0 and no record of any violations of UCF’s Golden Rule. They will meet monthly with the dean.
“Still I Rise: Remix” is a visual, lyrical, digital interactive fight song for civic action for the #BlackLivesMatter social justice and social change movement. Created during and by the stressors intensified from the global pandemic, this JavaScript interactive poetry remix embraces the digital activism made exponential during the pandemic through the platformization of counternarratives. The remix blends multiple digital mediums with cultural artifacts of the past and present to weave together a rhetorical and semiotic interactive experience that enlightens society and uplifts the human spirit. Through multimodality and intertextuality, “Still I Rise: Remix” exploits the aesthetics of the digital interactive experience through multiple artistic forms of expression, including code, video, audio, and hypertext. This COVID E-Lit interactive exhibition is a multimodal expression and declarative statement for the #BlackLivesMatter movement which embodies the spirit of change, inclusion, and social justice. “The medium is the message.” Experience “Still I Rise: Remix.”
