Greg Constantine, a Canadian-American documentary photographer, discusses his career focusing on long-term, immersive projects, particularly on immigration detention and statelessness.
About Our Guest
Greg Constantine is a documentary photographer, author, visual journalist whose work primarily focuses on human rights, injustice, and equality. Constantine has been featured in The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Newsweek, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, CNN, and Al-Jazeera. Constantine spent over 11 years documenting stateless communities in 18 countries, has worked with several international human rights organizations, and exhibitions of his work have been shown in over 50 cities around the world. He has also received several awards for his work including the Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London.
Find Greg Constantine Online:
Show Notes
01:09: Inspiration to get started in photography
04:11: Advantages of doing long-form journalism
06:24: Starting in this field later in life
08:19: How unexpected career journeys can be
09:33: Seven doors on immigration project
16:09: Creative initiatives
23:29: Separating advocacy and journalism in his work
29:50: How long-form journalism changes the approach
35:15: Experience giving a lecture at UO
39:59: Future Projects
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Damian Radcliffe 00:00
Hello and welcome to the demystifying media Podcast. I'm Damien Radcliffe, the Carolyn S Chambers professor of journalism at the University of Oregon, and in this series, we talk to leading scholars and media practitioners about their work at the leading edge of Communication Studies and practice. Today we're joined by Dr Greg Constantine, an American and Canadian documentary photographer based in Southeast Asia and the United States, Greg has dedicated his career to long term independent projects about underreported or neglected global stories, with a particular focus on documenting the impact of immigration detention and statelessness around the world. He is a multiple grantee of the oak Foundation, National Endowment for Democracy, Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, near philanthropy, open society, foundations and others. His award winning work has been exhibited in more than 30 cities around the world, and he's the author of three books. Dr Constantine's work takes a longitudinal look at the intersection of human rights, inequality and justice, identity, genocide and the power of the state. Greg, thank you so much for joining us today.
Greg Constantine 01:04
Thanks so much. It's great to be here. David,
Damian Radcliffe 01:08
so there's a lot of stuff there to unpack, but I really wanted to just go right back to the beginning and try to understand a little bit about your journey as a photographer. What really brought you into this into this space. Encourage you to pick up a camera. And how did you decide that long form documentary work was really there you wanted to specialize in?
Greg Constantine 01:29
Yeah, you know, I kind of came into photography and journalism a bit late in my life, you know, I mean, I started to become a photojournalist, I would say, at the around the age of 2930, I mean, I made a big career change, and just wanted to do something completely, totally different. And I had been really interested in trying to explore stories, uncover stories, share stories, and what would be the best medium for me to be able to do that. And, you know, I tried writing, but that wasn't going to be my thing. But photography was, I mean, I'm a self taught photographer. I've never been to journalism school, you know, I've taken one course over my career, and that was a course on how to develop my own film and make prints in a dark room, and everything from there on has just been like self discovery and trial and error and kind of finding my pathway in terms of where I kind of fit in, not only with the stories that I want to work on, but also how I can contribute to the larger discussions with the work. So that's kind of my pathway, and it's over the past 20, you know, over 20 years. It's been years of in a pattern of almost progression, evolving discovery, you know, trying to find where my what kind of projects to work on, and how they all tied together in terms of, kind of my identity as a photographer and a journalist and those types of things that I'm really interested and feel like I can make a contribution to. So that's been kind of like my trajectory over my career. And, you know, I think a lot of peers that I have and colleagues, you know, some are their niche is breaking news. Others are this conflict. You know, mine has really been almost like immersing myself long term into these kind of projects that take a global look at a subject matter and almost try to find ways of dissecting them and then visually translating them. That's been kind of my that's my lane, and oftentimes I find that kind of the space that I excel in, and actually the space that I'm most interested in as a person and as a journalist and as a storyteller, are trying to fill in those big gaps that are left open through the traditional kind of news cycle, especially when it comes to topics related to human rights and inequality and discrimination and racism and where the state plays a role in all of that. So yeah,
Damian Radcliffe 04:11
so it sounds like there's an advantage to having that kind of step back from the day to day news cycle and the kind of pressures that a lot of daily journalists and photographers would be encountering. Does that give you a flexibility and a freedom creatively?
Greg Constantine 04:28
Yeah. I mean, definitely. I mean, I can say that, you know, these are all kind of conscious decisions that I've made over the course of the past 20 years, or particularly within the first five years of my career, you kind of, you know, assess where you fit in and where your strengths are, and then choose, okay, this is where I'm going to pursue. And I found out, I realized early on that, you know, going from one assignment to the next to the next to the next was not something that was my. I where I excelled in and to where working on subjects where I could literally just totally immerse myself in, almost become, try to become an authority on that topic about, you know, having the freedom and the flexibility to work at a pace that I was comfortable with, because I feel like that translates in the work. I work very slow in that sense. If I had to go out and, you know, do something on assignment that was expected two days from now, it would be really difficult for me, because it's just not the way that I'm wired. And I know other photographers who are the same exact kind of way. So, yeah, that's that it's provided its its benefits, in the sense that I feel like it's allowed me to produce work that shows that immersive kind of element of things, but also at the same time, it does have its its challenges, in the sense that you know, finding funding to be able to do that Work has taken on a whole different kind of dimension, you know, and and being able to sustain that kind of work over all those years takes on a whole nother kind of dimension. But, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't change anything. It's, it's exactly I'm exactly where I want to be in my career, and with the work that I produced in the identity that I've, you know, kind of created over the past 25 years.
Damian Radcliffe 06:25
That's great. Well, I'd love to dive into some specific examples of that in a moment. But before that, I just wanted I'm just also curious. One things you mentioned is you came to this later, and I wonder if that influenced your, your your take on this, and that that brought with it an ability to to take that step back and perhaps see both here's here's some of the gaps that you talked about, but also meaning you know yourself better, and therefore the types of work that you want to do that perhaps is is harder to do if you're sort of 2122
Greg Constantine 07:00
years old. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you know, there was a coming into this kind of work with a different maturity, I guess you could say in my late 20s, not just as a person, but also intellectually and through just curiosity and also just the way that I would analyze things. I think, if I hope that makes sense, I don't think that I possess those kind of tools in my early 20s versus in my late 20s. And I think that there was, you know, there was a lot of personal, personal experience in those 20s that kind of contributed the all the all the different elements and characteristics that I think that the ingredients that I think I needed to be able to start working in this career that I didn't have in my early 20s. I think that if I had just, if I had left university and gone straight into this kind of work, I think, I don't think that the work would have been as, I don't know, meaningful as it would personally, having launched into it in my late 20s and at age of 32 so yeah, it's a great question. Well,
Damian Radcliffe 08:19
I think it's a really important takeaway for our audience as well, that that career paths are not linear. We hear that many, many times, and then often, some of the left turns you might take at later points in life can help you to find the place that actually you were meant to be, and everything kind of leads up to that point. I
Greg Constantine 08:37
couldn't agree with you more. I mean, really. I mean I think that you know when I, if I, if I think back on, you know those, those years of when I was, let's say, from 28 until maybe 3031, there was an intensive three years of exposing myself to the world in a way that I I grew up in Indiana and moved to New York City when I was 23 which was like moving to a whole nother world. And that provided a whole package of experiences of being in New York in my 20s, in the 1990s and then really spending three years primarily just traveling around the world with a backpack, exposing myself to different things. Those were all the those were all the experiences that I felt like I needed to be able to provide, you know, with the context for me to move forward with doing this kind of work. So, yeah,
Damian Radcliffe 09:32
so could you give us an example? Let's talk a little bit about one of your projects. Would you be happy to kind of share an example of something that you've either worked on or been been working on, and just sort of talk us through that journey of how the idea evolved, and then the field work, securing the funding, as you mentioned, and then kind of that sort of longitudinal take, just be great to kind of unpack an example. Of something that you've done kind of in a bit of depth.
Greg Constantine 10:03
Yeah, sure. I mean, I think I'll keep it very relevant to today, I think, and that would be the project seven doors on immigration detention. You know, I started that project. It would have been in 2015 2016 I had no intention of, at that particular point in time, of investing myself in that subject matter. It just it all came about totally organically, and it was I have found that throughout my career, there's always overlap between the subject matter of projects, but you can't anticipate that overlap while you're working on them. So I spent 11 years working on a project that was all about statelessness called nowhere people. And that project was really created my identity as as a photographer, and kind of solidified the working, the pace at which I would want to work, and how I would want to to craft these long term kind of projects. And at the end of that project, I went up the final book, because there was a trilogy of books that were published from that project. And as I was finishing up that project, I thought, you know, I feel like, over the past 1011, years, I've heard, you know, about all the stories that I could hear about stateless people, you know, and all of a sudden, working in Europe, towards the end of that project, I started to meet with stateless individuals in Europe who had been in and out of immigration detention in your in Italy or In Poland, or in the Netherlands or in the UK, all because of their lack of documentation and that they had no citizenship to any country in the world. And it was a story that I had I really was so moved by that I almost immediately knew that that was going to be the next project I was going to dive into. So it was one project informing another one. And so I started that project in 2015 2016 at that particular point in time, you had the the a lot of people moving from Middle East into Europe, and that's where my focus was. But then, you know, the first Trump administration came into office, and I always knew that the US was going to be the centerpiece of that whole project, because the US has the largest immigration detention system in the world. But I had really had no idea how much time I would end up spending on it, and I ended up spending a little over three years just working on the project in the US. And it was the first time that as a journalist, I had worked kind of in my home country after working internationally for all those years. And it was a project that just, you know, just kind of revealed itself, piece by piece by piece, trying to figure out different ways of articulating and visually translating something, the topic of immigration detention, in a very highly competitive journalistic environment where you have a lot of other photographers doing work for the wire services or on assignment for magazines and newspapers that have all the resources in the world to be able to to tell very, very big and robust stories. And so I just decided at that time that I needed to stay in my lane, you know, that was so easily distracted into a number of different spaces, but it was like, Okay, I'm going to specifically just focus only on what this detention state looks like in the US and how it's impacting people. And those were the kind of guardrails for me with that project. And I feel like now, at the end of the you know, I'm still working on that project, but specifically now the work that was created four years ago, five, six years ago, it's the value of it. Now, I never could have anticipated, but it's a project that has that I'm really incredibly proud of, and to be able to fund it was, you know, it was a monumental kind of task of trying to figure out where I could fit and and how that project could be sustained over those six or seven years. So, and you mentioned,
Damian Radcliffe 14:20
this is the first time you had really worked on a project. In your home country. Does did that feel different, or do you approach it in a different way as a result of it being in your in your backyard?
Greg Constantine 14:33
You know, I think it's a great question, and I think that it was, I think, I think I utilized the same kind of tools that I had learned. I almost felt like working internationally on the project on statelessness for those 10 years that almost prepared me with all the tools that I needed to be able to work in an agile and smart and intellect. Your way at home in the US. You know, I think that it gave me the ammunition to be able to really analyze a landscape in a much more kind of meaningful kind of way, rather than just working on whatever was presented in front of me, if that makes any sense, you know, because I was, I was taking that experience of 10 years of working on, diving into a big global project and trying to piece it all together and have it all make sense and create, you know, and tell a multi layered kind of story. And the US is about, as you know, all the different parts of the US is almost like a global story when you really look at it, you know. So it was like, how do I approach work in the North Pacific Northwest, versus the southwest, versus the central part of the US, and particularly the Midwest, where I'm from? And so it was, it was a, it was a really amazing experience. And, yeah, produce some, some work that I'm incredibly proud of. So,
Damian Radcliffe 16:09
so you mentioned, I mean, obviously this is a decade long project, and one that feels incredibly relevant now you're continuing to work on, on this. Are there, is there a particular moment over the course of that decade that you produced, a part of that story that you are especially proud of, or was especially impactful? Yeah.
Greg Constantine 16:31
I mean, you know, I think that there's, there's probably two things, and one is that, you know, going back to kind of working independently and immersing yourself. I mean, I think one of the I don't, I don't really like to use the word luxury, but one of the benefits of that is that, you know, I've chosen throughout my career to fund the projects that I work on independently through, you know, different foundations and grants and fellowships for a number of different reasons, and one of them is that it gives me full and total authorship over what I can do with the work, how I can partner with people, what initiatives and creative kind of ideas I can come up with, how it can engage with people in different places, and how it can then hopefully translate into something that's impactful, you know? And so I would probably say that there's two things with that project. One is, is that I feel like it's the it was. It's the first visual project that has almost established a photographic Atlas of what this big, huge, ominous detention system looks like in the US. I mean, usually when you see reporting from even the biggest media organizations, the times or whatever it is, the fact is that that articulation of the detention system the United States is usually translated through infographics or illustrated something like that, you know, infographics or illustrated maps or something it's never done in a way that visually shows what these places look like, how ominous they look, where they're, where they are to begin with, and everything. And I feel like one of the things that was created with that project that I'm really proud of, and I feel was impactful, is that it has created this visual Atlas of what this system looks like and how vast it is. I think the other initiative related to that project would be towards this would be the beginning of 2022 the first part of 2022 we created a series of pop up exhibitions of the project. I mean, getting that project published through the traditional media was next to impossible. Nobody was interested in it because it was too big. I don't think people knew what to do with it. And also, at the same time, I don't feel like the work neatly fit into what editors were seeking out. So it was my responsibility then to almost find the market for the work, and that market was through really creative initiatives. So we did a series of pop up exhibitions using a 27 foot long moving truck, and basically planted ourselves in the middle of cities and had the inside of the truck as a gallery space that was interactive with audio. The outside of the truck was used as a projection space in the evening time, and then it was used as a platform for organizations or anyone else in these particular cities working on immigrant rights, detention, incarceration, human rights to use as a platform to have discussions and bring people in. And I feel like the response that I received, the immediate response that I received from people who had spent an hour or an hour and a half, which we all know, is probably 10 times longer than. Somebody's going to spend reading a story online after they had immersed themselves for an hour and a half, the comments that people had to me about that experience showed that they had a meaningful engagement with the story and the work, and they walked away with a deeper understanding, and that, to me, is really what the work is all about, yeah, well,
Damian Radcliffe 20:21
and I think it's such a great model for, as you said, getting people to immerse themselves in a topic in a way that they wouldn't do through through traditional media, and I'm guessing, also by taking those stories out and to to an audience, perhaps reaching people who are otherwise also just wouldn't have come across it in in more traditional media environments,
Greg Constantine 20:43
absolutely. I mean, I don't, I don't think that. I don't think that, you know, I don't think that we as journalists or storytellers can rely on a retail approach towards things, you know. I mean, you know, there's, there are, there are obviously certain organizations in in in our space where people are always going to be flocking to. But the fact is, is that, you know, I do feel that this is a really exciting time to be very enterprising in terms of how we're sharing stories and engaging with people. And you know, sometimes I think that, you know, the metrics of how many people a story reaches with doesn't particularly translate into a meaningful engagement a deeper understanding of that story. So I'm not a person who's, you know, who puts a huge amount of pressure on myself or on seeing that 10s of 1000s of people are reading a post, or whatever it is. I'm really much more interested in exploring those kind of interactions that the work can have with people, so that they can have a deeper understanding and meaningful engagement with the with the with the work in its totality. I guess, you know,
Damian Radcliffe 21:53
yeah, and do the funders you're working with get that? Because sometimes we we do see a tension between kind of the objectives of storytellers, creatives, journalists and foundations, philanthropic funders. There's, there's often conversation around the fact that they work on different timescales, and that their KPIs might also look, look very different.
Greg Constantine 22:14
Yeah, I actually think, I actually think that that's one of the reasons why people have funded me, you know, is because I think that they they see that there's a track record of of looking at a topic and exploring it in a way that the traditional media doesn't have the time or the capacity to be able to do, and Also, at the same time, the ability to take that work and create different initiatives that can almost approach it from multiple perspectives for different audiences, in that sense, you know. So I think that's one of the reasons why the foundations that have believed in me all these years and have helped fund the work has helped to support it, you know, over all these years too so, and I feel that today that's even that's needed more now than I think ever, you know, and funding is increasingly becoming more competitive and more and more challenging. But at the same time I, you know, I feel like that kind of those calculations that I've made are the calculations that I want to continue to, kind of keep exploring so and you
Damian Radcliffe 23:29
also mentioned some of the partners you've worked with on this as well, some of the NGOs that you have, have, have worked with. They obviously have quite a strong policy agenda and kind of advocacy agenda. Those are words that some journalists feel uncomfortable with. Others are much more happier to lean into. Where do you see your work on that spectrum?
Greg Constantine 23:51
I mean, you know the let's put it this way, I feel the work, the stories that I work on are they're rooted in human rights. They're rooted in injustice and discrimination and intolerance and exclusion and all the different powers that be that are fueling all those different types of things. So, you know, I guess the thing is, is that, how could I not be somewhat of a of an activist when I've chosen to work on these kind of stories, you know? I mean, and, and I have no shame in saying that, you know? I mean, I want the work to be able to make a difference, and I'm not. The one thing is that I'm not creating a space that is providing a particular agenda. I'm just creating work that is there for people to absorb, and I'm not providing answers, but the work is there to hopefully spark people to ask more questions. And I think that balance is something I'm very comfortable with in terms. Of the kind of how, the way that I go about the work, the way that I try to find creative ways of disseminating the work and and the impact that it can make. You know, I mean,
Damian Radcliffe 25:16
well, I think, I personally think it's a non argument, because I would say Genesis. I've always been selective about the stories that they choose to cover. So in doing that, you are immediately creating an agenda to some to some extent, anyway, and I think you know, particularly when you're immersed in a topic and a subject area, as you are for such a long period of time, it's impossible to kind of divorce yourself from that, from that subject in a way that if the next day you're going off and shooting something completely different is perhaps easier to do. So, you know, I think that then throws out some interesting questions around, you know, how do you both kind of sustain the energy to work on projects over a long period of time? We're seeing some very valuable conversations about kind of burnout and mental health that we're seeing much more more of across our industry now. So I'm curious about how you sort of maintain that momentum and energy and interest over a period of time, but also when you're dealing with these kinds of, you know, really challenging subjects, how you are able to, or if you are indeed able to, sort of step of step away from that at the end of the day and and switch off,
Greg Constantine 26:28
yeah. I mean, I think that's another great question. I feel like kind of, you know, everybody has a different answer to how they cope with that and how they navigate these kind of things, you know, I mean, like I said at the beginning of our conversation, I mean, I really believe in a slow journalistic approach towards things, and I think in that it provides me with the space to be able to think about things, to be able to come to terms With things, for me to be able to to analyze not just the story, but analyze myself, you know, as a human being, to be kind to myself at the same time to, you know, invest myself in my relationships with my partner and my friend, as much as I'm my friends and family, as much as I'm investing in my stories, that In the stories and the projects that I'm working on. So I think that in that sense, for me, Greg Constantine, I've managed to be able to find that balance, but that's come over, you know, working on these types of things for over 20 years, you know, but also at the same time, I think that one of the things that particularly with these kind of projects, is that, you know this, this also, I think, is a really important thing for us to be talking about too, and that is, you know, our responsibilities. I mean, you know, my responsibility is not to the news organization that I'm working for my or my responsibility is not to, you know, the to whoever I might be working for. I mean, in a lot of ways, my responsibility is to make sure that I'm that I'm doing as much as I can to understand the stories that I'm working on, to be able to analyze them responsibly, but also at the same time, to live up to my obligations of the people who I'm including and the subject matter of those projects, to make sure that their stories are actually heard, you know, in creative ways. If I'm going to sit down for an hour or two or three with somebody and they're going to share probably, the experiences of some of the most traumatic moments in their life, you know, that story has to end up somewhere in multiple different platforms, so that it can reach people in multiple kind of different ways, so that they have they get a little bit closer to having some a meaningful empathy with the person. And so that commitment to that is something that I feel also is a driving force behind the work that I do and the projects that I do, and it provides the fuel to continue to keep working on these projects, because of that, that that deep sense of responsibility that you have, you know, and I'll never place, and I've said this to people before, but I never place such a high expectation on photography or journalism to make change. But the point is, is that, you know, I do have an expectation that it can contribute to something that is part of a chain reaction of something that can hopefully galvanize something to create a change, you know. And I have to continuously keep believing that just because, just because of the work. So I don't know if that answers your question, but no, yeah. I mean, it does.
Damian Radcliffe 29:50
I think, I think anything also speaks to the, again, the sort of the pace that you intentionally bring to your to your work to therefore build trust and rapport, where. Of the sources and the people whose stories you're telling as well. And there are some very interesting questions around how, how do we do more of that? But also, how do you do more of that, potentially in when you are working to shorter timescales? And I think we can safely say that a lot of people have had very bad experiences of working with the media, and if you've had that direct engagement, and it's not being particularly positive that is only going to reinforce many of these messages we see about mistrust and distrust in in the news media today. Yeah,
Greg Constantine 30:31
and, you know, I think that, I think the other thing about the at least, speaking for myself, about the working at that particular pace, is that, you know, I think at the end of the day, what it ends up doing, at least for me, is that it ends up opening space in my head to be able to see other opportunities for how to tell a story differently than what is expected, that what people are looking For, that, you know, approaches something from a very different perspective that you may not have thought about earlier. So, like, I'll give you an example. I mean, like, take for example. Okay, so I've been 111, constant throughout the past 20 years of my career has been totally being dedicated to the story of the Rohingya community from from Myanmar, alright, you know, I may started my work on that community of of just trying to understand and document what was happening in that community in 2006 and I've been committed to that story ever since then. And it's gone through, you know, all these different kind of, you know, cycles that have to deal with what's been happening to this community, and including this catastrophic kind of burst of genocidal violence that occurred in 2017 and documenting the aftermath of all that. But you know, after a period of time, I had kind of coming to terms with my with my own work related to the Rohingya story, in the sense that, you know, the I feel that it's so important to be documenting the the the effects of state violence on communities, you know, what does that look like? How does it impact people? You know what, what generational kind of trauma does that end up inflicting on people, and also, at the same time, you know, a lot of violence in the world today is violence that doesn't translate into what we see in the media. You know, it's not about physical violence or physical death. It's about this invisible form of violence that's structural, that's systematic, that's the, you know, that really ends up damaging communities, the imposition of laws, or how they're how they're implemented on a local level, those kind of elements of racism and discrimination that are really, you know, pretty much abandoned by the traditional day to day news cycle, but at the same time, they live permanently within the lives of day to day, lives of the people in these kind of stories, particularly the Rohingya community. And it got to a point to where I was spending so much time on trying to visually articulate that that I think I got to a point to where I realized, you know, I don't think I can continue to keep producing the same kind of pictures that I've been producing for the past 15 years. Of this story, it's not going anywhere. I feel like I've done what I can. But in that space of working in a slow kind of capacity, it then opened up space for me to be able to say, if I want to continue working on the Rohingya story, I'm going to have to take a radically different approach, and as a thinker, as a photographer, as a journalist, as a human being, as a storyteller. So what is that going to be? And ended up developing into this project that I've been working on for the past five years called Echo, and it's a collaborative visual project with the community that is almost like removing me as the image maker, but at the same time, it's it's using photographs and imagery as a way to tell a story, which is what we do as journalists, you know, in a way that produces and contributes something totally new and fresh to the larger history of how people have been documenting the Rohingya story and telling their story. And for me, it's been, it's been a transformative kind of moment in my career of, you know, of really thinking about, how can you tell a story in a different way, and what is, how do I define myself as a as a photographer and as a storyteller, as a journalist? And I think it's, it has to be honest with you, I think that this particular project at clay has something that can leave much more infinite value long term than probably any of the photographs that I might have taken from 2000 Six until 2019 so those kind of things, I think, for me, are only come about by having the space to think and explore and discover different ways of doing things. Yeah, well,
Damian Radcliffe 35:15
and I think that approach, and indeed, of course, the quality of your work and the sheer beauty of the esthetic, the focus of the areas that you are have specialized in that really resonated with our faculty and our students when you came to visit us. And I'm curious as to whether there were any particular moments or conversations that you had that have sort of stood out to you as you sort of look back six, seven months ago, from your time with us on campus, what were some of the things that you took away from being able to kind of talk about your craft and engage with the next generation of storytellers?
Greg Constantine 35:51
You know, I found that my ex, my experience there at U of O was it was really incredible, because I was engaging with a number of different kind of levels of of of young adults at at this time in there, at this incredibly exciting time in their life, from Just undergraduates to students in master's programs to PhD students. And you know, whether it was giving a lecture and having questions asked by in a in a lecture hall of 300 students, which I did, and having them like it was almost like from the undergraduates. It was that curiosity at that stage in their university career that I just found was so exciting to be around, you know, like they were just thinking about how they could do things differently, about what would the path potentially look like, or how could it change at this very early stage in their 20s, you know, I mean, and looking forward. And I think it was really exciting to be able to talk with them about kind of my trajectory, at my career trajectory, and how it is very non traditional in that sense, but also at the same time, some of their curiosities about the subject matter and places that and people in places that they may not have been exposed to. So that was super that was very exciting. But then, at the same time, it was really amazing to be able to talk with, you know, a small class of documentary filmmakers about, you know, just the mechanics of doing this kind of work. You know, everybody's going to have their own creativity. They're they're going to bring in their own intellectual kind of weaponry into the projects that they're working on. But it's like that curiosity of talking about the mechanics of how everybody's going about doing their work was another really amazing experience. I mean, I also have to say, you know, talking with the small group of students with you and your class was just totally fascinating. It was just really, really encouraging, and their questions were amazing. And you know that element of like, okay, here's where I am in my university career. These are the kind of things that I'm thinking about. I'm trying to explore all these different options. And it's almost like allowing for people to know that you don't have to choose one particular lane these days and commit to it for years and years and years, that changing and moving and adapting and discovering is all part of our journey, you know, and they're at a really specific part, and then. And then, you know, another highlight would have been talking with Julie's group of PhD students, and the research methodologies of everybody working on different topics and subject matters, but also at the same time. And I found this too, is that you can have 10 different people working on 10 different research projects, but you're going to always find elements of similarity and commonality between all of those that you can learn from and employ in your own work in a way that you never really thought of. So it was, it was a it was really an amazing kind of two way conversation in that I learned a lot, and I hope that the students learned some from from me, and they were just some really great, exciting conversations. And, and, yeah, I mean, this the school journalism and communications there was just so great to meet faculty and, and, yeah, it was an amazing experience. It was really I walked away from it feeling very energized and hopeful and optimistic and everything. So, yeah,
Damian Radcliffe 39:46
well, that's good to hear, particularly right right now. So I'm conscious of time. I said we'd take up half an hour of your time. We've gone way over that, because I could talk to you for days. So just just very briefly you before we started. Recording, you mentioned you have a number of interesting things happening over the course of the summer. Could you just kind of share that with our audience of in terms of like, what's what's next for you?
Greg Constantine 40:08
So I, you know, I think that this summer is is the next two months are very much committed to two very big and important exhibitions of the echo lay the Rohingya project. One is going to be taking place in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where there's an enormous diaspora community of exiled people from all different nationalities, in ethnic groups from Burma in Thailand, and that's one of the key audiences for this project to reach. So I'm really excited about that exhibition. And then that's in July. And then the second exhibition will happen in Dhaka, Bangladesh in August, which this is an incredibly important time for the Rohingya community. There's a million Rohingya living as refugees in southern Bangladesh, but these this is a very important time in the discussions for their kind of future, given the grim kind of landscape inside their home country of Burma, but the political discussions that are taking place around the world, including in Bangladesh, are very important, and having this project kind of almost insert itself into those the consciousness of people as they're making those kind of agendas and policy decisions and providing something that's a whole different way, a new way for how people understand the Rohingya community and see the Rohingya community, I think, is really important. So there's those two big things that are going to be happening this summer, and then obviously the different foundations that I'm going to need, logistically and funding wise, to really continue the work on immigration detention in the US over The next couple of years. Because it's, it's it's expanding exponentially, as we all know, and I just think that there's a lot of a lot of space for the kind of work that I want to continue to keep doing when it comes to this topic in the US over the next few years. So yeah, it'll be a busy summer.
Damian Radcliffe 42:18
Yeah, it sounds like it. Well, we wish you best of luck with the with the exhibitions and the ongoing work, and thanks again for joining us today, Greg, and also for your time on campus with us last fall, we had such a blast hanging out with you.
Greg Constantine 42:30
Oh, absolutely thank you, Dave. Thanks for so much for the conversation.
Damian Radcliffe 42:39
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