A Father’s Lullaby by Rashin Fahandej
A Father’s Lullaby is a multi-year, research-based community co-creation initiative that began in 2015. A Father's Lullaby interrogates racial bias and structural racism and acknowledges the role of media and technology in perpetuating this challenge as well as their potential to disrupt historical patterns. We cultivate processes that democratize access to technology and storytelling through community co-creation. A Father’s Lullaby materializes in a vast array of creative and public engagement opportunities, including an ongoing series of public interventions, immersive, interactive, and participatory installations, incubation labs, tech workshops, and a pioneering XR co-creation pedagogy at Emerson College launched in Spring of 2020.
A Father's Lullaby highlights the role of men in raising children and their absence due to the racial disparities in the criminal justice system and its direct impact on children, women, and lower-income communities. The project is centered on the marginalized voices of absent fathers while inviting all men to participate by singing lullabies and sharing memories of childhood. Explored through the space of love and intimacy, the project is being developed with community members as creative collaborators. Intimate interviews, songs, and lullabies offer poetic meditations on the spaces of love and trauma, presence and absence, and the power of personal memories to interrogate the structural violence of mass incarceration. Stories and lived experiences of impacted communities acknowledge the current gaps and challenges our society is facing today while, amplifying the collective will for structural shifts needed for inclusive futures centered on justice, equity, and equality.
Disrupting the Traditional Power Dynamics in Media and Tech: In order to reimagine social paradigms and redesign systems, there is a fundamental need to redefine processes so that they become the embodiment of the changes envisioned. Processes are not simply neutral paths but the manifestation of the social and political forces that can perpetuate inequities and amplify the same social constructs that we aim to change. Community Co-Creation processes center on the lived experiences of community members as expertise and disrupt the traditional power dynamics within the traditional media and tech production. This process forms new social structures that make visible unconventional forms of solidarity and criticality across differences toward equitable forms of access and representation. A Father’s Lullaby aims to be a “Poetic Movement” where art and technology mobilize a plethora of voices while utilizing public places and virtual spaces to ignite a more inclusive dialogue to effect social change.
