Participatory media is media where the audience can play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating content. We work with local residents, young and old, to offer training in multimedia storytelling and collaborative projects that generate public documentary content and elevate local voices and perspectives. 

 

Featured Projects

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ROJOVIOLETA

We worked with a group of 12 local kids from Puerto Viejo to develop a short fiction film about the connection between people and the environment in the South Caribbean of Costa Rica. A team of communications students from the University of Costa Rica offered workshops on storytelling, script development, casting and production.

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NUESTRO PUERTO VIEJO AYER Y HOY

Students from the University of Costa Rica (UCR TCU 127) joined the Rich Coast Project in Puerto Viejo for a week of participatory video and photography aimed at documenting local Puerto Viejo history and culture. UCR students partnered with local teens to train them in audiovisual storytelling techniques and together produced the short documentary, Nuestro Puerto Viejo Ayer y Hoy.

Learn more about the February 2017 project and watch the video Nuestro Puerto Viejo Ayer y Hoy.

STORIES FROM CARIBE SUR: CHAPTER 1

Podcasts are digital audio stories made available to stream or download online. Our first series of podcasts were co-produced by student volunteers from the Indiana University Media School, local story facilitators from Talamanca, and members of the Rich Coast Project staff.  The story facilitators were responsible for selecting topics relevant and important to the story of the South Caribbean, and the student volunteers helped to collect interviews and audio footage and edit the stories into podcasts. 

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STORIES FROM CARIBE SUR: CHAPTER 2

Students from The Media School at Indiana University spent their spring break conducting 15 interviews with 33 different local participants over 3 days in March 2018. They were asked to select short clips from each of their interviews and pair it with visual material they gathered throughout the week. Their completed projects are a combination of short videos, photo slideshows, and photo clips that collectively comprise Chapter 2 of "Stories from Caribe Sur", an ongoing participatory oral history project that activates local citizens to be the creators of their own public archival content.

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STORIES OF THE 1991 LIMÓN EARTHQUAKE

Local storytellers recounted their experience of the 7.7 M earthquake that shook Costa Rica's Caribbean coast in 1991, leaving the landscape transformed and marking an important moment in the affected communities' histories.These recordings were made at a special storytelling event for local school children hosted by Casa de la Cultura Puerto Viejo, the Center of Documentation and Information (CNE) and the Rich Coast Project on the 20th anniversary of the 1991 earthquake. 

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THIS IS MY HOME: YOUTH PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP

To better understand what young people think about concepts of place and identity, we hosted a youth photography workshop and equipped five local youth with cameras to take a series of photos around the theme “This is my home.” A selection of their photographs was on display at ATEC in Puerto Viejo in March, 2014.