Five Reasons Why: Spring 2022 Fellow Reflects on her Experiences with EchoX

In Summer 2021, EchoX’s DIGITIZE held “How to Look Cool Online,” a pilot HTML workshop created by Jacob Arnez, a former DIGITIZE youth council member in partnership with EchoX staff. The following Spring, Hidaya Abdinur, one of the participants, joined EchoX as our Spring Social Media Fellow. She created an array of social media posts to market the Summer 2022 “How to Look Cool Online” workshop. Here, she talks about her experience in the Summer 2021 program.

Hidaya won “Best Community Reflection” in the awards ceremony at the end of the workshop. This is what she (and the judges) had to say about her website:

Hidaya: “My website is a biography of my grandmother who immigrated from Ethopia: Over the summer, I spent time with my grandmother and realized how little I knew about her. I began by asking her a series of generic questions about her childhood, which she flatly refused to answer. Late at night, I decided to try again, and to my astonishment, she began telling me countless stories. It isn’t, however, the story I told or attempted to tell; the story I tried to convey was mine. My process of getting to my grandmother.”

Judges’ Feedback: Hidaya’s site embeds the audience in evocative storytelling, unexpected humor, and the sincere invitation to participate and contribute in the creator’s process and self-reflection. The experience successfully subverts the audience’s expectations and I loved that I never knew what was coming next! But by moving between memes and a candid discussion of how the way we tell stories is culturally situated, I really appreciated how the site offers a self-aware account of what it means to encounter our cultural, narrative, and formal expectations and be left learning something entirely new.

Learn more about the Summer 2021 Workshop and its winners here. For updates on DIGITIZE’s programs, you can sign up for our mailing list or visit us on Instagram (@echoxnw) or Facebook (@EchoXNW). Questions, comments, or concerns? Email us at Digitize@echox.org.