Create mindfulness in your media use

We are excited to announce the launch of our blog, The Monthly Engagement. Our intention is to provide you with questions, reflections and resources on different topics pertaining to media literacy and democratic engagement.

Conversations with Canaries Podcast

Future episodes will continue exploring similar issues from different angles, bringing a variety of voices to bear on these important issues that will shape our world for decades to come. Listen, learn, and please join the conversation with us.

mission - to strengthen democracy through media literacy. vision statements

“The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”

-James Baldwin

values visualization - Creativity, Intentionality, Well-Being, Truth and Community.

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American Psychosis
by Amanda Zackem

American Psychosis is a short documentary film inspired by an essay of the same name written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author and activist Chris Hedges. The film is structured around an interview with Hedges discussing consumerism, totalitarian corporate power and living in a world dominated by pervasive illusion. The film has been included in more than 30 film festivals to date, winning awards including Best Short Film at the Berlin Independent Film Festival, Best of Fest at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival and a Humanitarian Award of Distinction at the Best Shorts Awards.


activists TOOLBOX


1. Pick a Date

2. Create an event and invite people to attend.*

3. Set-up viewing device and connect to AmericanCanary.org - No internet? contact us for remote access to our films at info@americancanary.org

4. Download our curious mind questions below for an enriching after-screening discussion or use them as a starting point to develop your own.

5. Sit-back, relax and enjoy the film.

 

*Private screenings are great for family/friend gatherings, team building exercises, classroom enrichment, organization and community events.

  1. What is the American Dream?

  2. Does the American Dream Still Exist? Why or Why not?

  3. What do you feel that Americans stand for as a nation? 

  4. How does the presence of these corporations affect your local environment? Local economy? Positive and negative?

  5. Why do we allow large corporations to be the sole or primary job providers in our communities? How can we change this narrative? 

  6. Why should we care about issues that may not directly affect us? 

  7. If a corporation is treated as a human, what should we expect from them emotionally, physically, socially? 

  8. What governmental assumptions and structures should we be challenging? Why? 

  9. Why do we allow spectacle to distract us from important issues? 

  10. What can you do to create change in your life...the lives of others?

 

chris hedges portrait

Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, New York Times best-selling author, professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister.He has written 11 books, including the New York Times best-seller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. His other books include “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” (2015) “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best-selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and has sold over 400,000 copies.  He writes a weekly column for the website Truthdig in Los Angeles, run by Robert Scheer, and hosts a show, On Contact, on RT America.

2002 for coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002....

Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and studied classics, including ancient Greek and Latin, at Harvard University. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.

He currently teaches a class through Princeton University at a state prison in New Jersey where half of the students are Princeton undergraduates and half are prisoners.

Hedges began his career reporting on the Falkland War from Argentina for National Public Radio. He went on to cover the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua for five years, first for The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio and later The Dallas Morning News. After six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the bureau chief for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia and later reported the war in Kosovo. Afterward, he was based in Paris as part of the team covering al-Qaeda and global terrorism. He left the Times after receiving a formal reprimand from the newspaper for publicly denouncing the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.

In 2012, Hedges successfully sued President Barack Obama over section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which overturned the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the military from acting as a domestic police force. Section 1021 gives the military the authority to indefinitely detain and deny due process to U.S. citizens who are branded by the state as terrorists. The decision was overturned on appeal by the Obama administration. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the ruling, known as Hedges v. Obama, in 2014.

Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He spent a year studying classics at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. In 2014 he was ordained as a minister for social witness at the Second Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth, N.J. The theologian James Cone, the father of Black Liberation Theology, preached the sermon along with Cornel West. The ordination was approved for his work in New Jersey prisons where Hedges has taught college credit courses for nearly a decade.

Hedges, who was born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont and grew up in a small farm town in upstate New York where his father served as a Presbyterian minister, lives in Princeton, N.J. He is married to the Canadian actress Eunice Wong, with whom he has two children. He has two children from a previous marriage.

More Work by Chris Hedges:
Books:
War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

Death of the Liberal Class

Death of the Liberal Class

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

mpire of Illusion, The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

Empire of Illusion, The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

Wages of Rebellion, The Moral Imperative of Revolt

Wages of Rebellion, The Moral Imperative of Revolt

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress

The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress

What Every Person Should Know About War

What Every Person Should Know About War

Losing Moses on the Freeway

Losing Moses on the Freeway

Collateral Damage: American's War Against Iraqi Civilians

Collateral Damage: American's War Against Iraqi Civilians

WI Don't Believe in Atheists

I Don't Believe in Atheists

PARTNERS

We seek relationships with individuals, organizations and independent companies that adhere to conscious core values. We look forward to creating mutually-beneficial collaborations that support and fund instruments of positive social change.

We have partnered with Haymarket Books, an independent nonprofit book publisher, part of the “Center for Economic Research and Social Change,” featuring the likes of Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn and Rebecca Solnit. Haymarket will connect us with their authors and promote American Canary produced films.

We look forward to partnering with nonprofits, publishers, educators, filmmakers and change-makers who can use media as a tool for their cause.


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