Welcome to Arts of Resistance. I'm your professor, Stacey Stormes. I did a BFA from right here at USF from my undergrad with an emphasis in print making and a sub emphasis in electronic media. And then I went to Columbia College Chicago for my MFA where I studied interdisciplinary arts and media, which is a focus on mixed media, installation, and new media work. 

As an activist and an artist, I'm very interested in how people use art to change the world and make a positive impact. And I hope you are, too. 

This class is designed with the projects being cross disciplinary, so I'm hoping that you will bring your own background to your coursework in the arts here. That means that we won't all have the exact same format. One person might do a video piece. One person might do an analysis or a response. 

Another person might do an actual real life performance or protest that they then document and share with the class. So it's very open for you to interpret the assignments how you like and to bring your own background to make them the best you can. 

I'm really excited about the online nature of this class because so much of resistance these days is really taking to the internet. If you look at the Arab Spring, for instance, a lot of revolutions were started through Twitter. A lot of online campaigns are having massive impact. If you look at equal rights, black lives matter, marriage equality-- there's tons of issues that are really using the internet as a platform to exchange ideas and to motivate change and progress in our world. To have real world results starting with an online base. 

So this class is going to really take advantage of that mode. We're going to have a lot of conversations on class. So your discussions are not just something you're going to check off to get a point. 

They're something I want you to really have a dialogue going. You're going to bounce ideas off each other. You're going to challenge each other and help to shape each other's progress through feedback. 

So I hope you guys are as excited about this class as I am. I'm really passionate about the topic as are a lot of the wonderful artists that I'm going to be showing you. I'm hoping that they can all be a really good example to you. Of how you can further your own discourse-- how you can get your own ideas across in a really effective way. And I'm really excited to see what you guys are going to bring to the table, and to help you shape the topics that you care about.