Subject: Evolving Relationships: Mongolian Women Across the Gobi & Nine-Story Mountain Documentary

ACMS Documentary Presentation
Evolving Relationships: Mongolian Women Across the Gobi 
 &
Nine Story Mountain Documentary
Saturday August 2nd starting at 2pm
Mongolia-India Joint School - 3rd Floor Auditorium
Next to Mandal Building / Rosewood 2 restaurant
Seoul Street across from ACMS office.
click link for map  - Mongolia-India Joint School map
Evolving Relationships: Mongolian Women Across the Gobi
The Gobi Expedition is comprised of a three-person female research team that will be traveling across a portion of the Gobi in July 2014, from Sainshand (Dornogovi) in the east via Dalanzadgad to Bayan Ovoo (Govi Altai) in the west, meeting and speaking with herder women and girls about their access to and use of mobile communications technologies. The team will investigate how access to and use of new media platforms in the Gobi may be informing new understandings of individual and collective female identities and ways of interacting with different communities, particularly in response to urbanization, Buddhist revivalism, and the growing extractive industry in the Gobi.






Documentary:
Nine-Story Mountain
Nine-Story Mountain charts the path of three western researchers, from Lhasa to Mount Kailash, Tibet, in summer 2012, on a journey to explore pilgrimage practices across the Tibetan plateau. Together, they set out to unearth the secrets of a mountain and landscape that have magnetized millions of people for centuries.
As some of the few westerners to enter Tibet in July 2012, following a partial ban on foreign entry, Augusta, Don, and Lara travel across the Tibetan plateau to reach Mount Kailash --encountering a vast landscape subject to the encroachment of commercial and industrial development. Equipped with a Canon d500 rebel, an H2ZOOM, and a dedicated Tibetan guide and translator, they capture the stories of Tibetan nomads and teahouse owners, of Tibetan, Hindu, and Chinese pilgrims, and a scattering of Western pilgrims. As they join pilgrims on the pilgrimage route, or Kora, around Mount Kailash, they seek to understand the nature of pilgrimage by observing the landscape and collecting stories from pilgrims along the way. They begin to realize that these stories are powerful teaching tools - stories that can teach the world about the nature of coexistence and the importance of environmental preservation. 
BIOS

Augusta Thomson (@AugustaXThomson) is a graduate of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University, where she studied Archaeology and Anthropology, with a primary interest in Landscape Anthropology, Visual Anthropology, Media Anthropology, and the material culture of the Indo-Tibetan region. She has a vested interest in documentary media and journalism; and hopes to work at the intersection of journalism, media, and museums, promoting heritage preservation and facilitating the journalistic contributions of marginalized communities around the world. She is the Director, Creative Director, and DP of Nine-Story Mountain, a feature-length documentary film about the pilgrimage to and around Mount Kailash, a sacred mountain in the far west of Tibet, which will premiere at Tibet House in New York City in August 2014. From 2012-2013 she worked at 10x10/Girl Rising as the Director of Corporate Engagement, Outreach and Distribution. She also interned with the filmmakers Sarah Teale and Lisa Jackson on a documentary currently in production about the Adirondack Grazers; and served as anthropology intern under the direction of Dr. Laurel Kendall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She is a recent Fulbright recipient and will spend the next nine months working on a self-directed digital museum and documentary research project in Ladakh, India, before she enrolls at Columbia School of Journalism in New York City. She is a freelance journalist and has written for media outlets, such as The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, the New Internationalist,and The Wellesley Magazine.

Lara Koerner Yeo (@larankyeo) holds a Master’s in human rights and humanitarian action from Sciences Po’s Paris School of International Affairs in France and a Bachelor’s of Arts in political science and women’s and gender studies from Wellesley College in the United States. She will matriculate as a JD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law in August 2014. Lara has an academic and professional background in human rights research and advocacy with a particular academic interest in multicultural politics in federal states, international women’s and indigenous rights law, and domestic human rights mobilization and advocacy. She has experience working with human rights and social justice organizations, including the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action, Justice for Girls, Human Rights Watch, Citizens for Global Solutions, Physicians for Human Rights, and the West Coast Legal Education and Action Fund. Lara is also the Associate Producer of a feature length documentary, Nine-Story Mountain. She participated in the 2012 ethnographic research expedition across Tibet to Mount Kailsh to investigate the material culture of pilgrimage at Mount Kailash, where production of the documentary took place. She is currently a participant in an ethnographic research expedition in the Gobi to investigate access to and use of mobile communications technologies by herder women and girls. 
American Center for Mongolian Studies, 642 Williams Hall, 255 S. 36th St, Philadelphia, PA 19104, United States
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