This essay brings together creative practice and pedagogy centered on the Marshall Islands to examine how poetry and politics, used together as a critical call-and-response strategy, can contribute to the achievement of climate and nuclear justice for that country. The first part of the essay discusses my work-in-progress documentary film, Her Excellency, which focuses on the stories of women who are heads of state—in particular, the women I met and interviewed in the Marshall Islands in August 2018. The second part describes how I incorporated the film’s stories from the Marshall Islands into an ecomedia film course I taught in spring 2022. While the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily halted the film’s production, I continued my creative practice and research in the remote-learning classroom, where I established a spirit of co-inspiration with my ecomedia students. In the first half of a semester focused on the Marshall Islands, students critically and creatively considered what steps we can take to mobilize our support for the Marshallese people and for ourselves in the face of rising sea levels. Through their ecomedia projects on the Marshall Islands the students steered their audiences to navigate our entangled and problematic world, visualize our place in this world, understand the importance of feeling with islanders, and situate our lives in relation to the Marshallese. These connective relations matter to our mutual survival and mutual healing from the brutal acts of history so that we may forge paths toward livable presents and futures for all.

“Transmedia Arts Activism and Language Revitalization: Critical Design, Ethics and Participation in Third Digital Documentary” is a practice- and theory-based dissertation focused on indigenous and minority language endangerment and revival through explorations of case studies and personal stories from Taiwan and Hawai’i. It consists of the feature-length documentary Tongues of Heaven, the companion web application Root Tongue: Sharing Stories of Language Identity and Revival, and a written component describing the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the critical arts practice engaged in these works. This dissertation examines a major thematic in the documentary, which is its engagement with the term “native”—as topic, object and subject—and its attending discourse and practices of authenticity, ethnography, salvage ethnography, and autoethnography. It details the materialization of the documentary Tongues of Heaven through an analysis of the (post)colonial historical circumstances that led to its production; its collaborative cross-boundary and transnational mode of production; and the Third Cinema, experimental and feminist approaches that inspired its media praxis. I then discuss the under-acknowledged process of film/video editing by analyzing the limits of postructuralist endeavors in representation, and theorizing the concept of interval, as it exists between and within shots, as a productive spectatorial intervention. In the effort to extend public engagement with documentary issues via digital and online technologies, I initially survey the discursive and technological interventions into the notions of “public” and “participation,” and how offline and online spheres of publics, counterpublics and community operate, intersect and interact to create multiple ways of being together in community, as a public and with oneself. I conclude with an analysis of the critical arts practice in the design and production of the Root Tongue transmedia activist art platform to pilot new collaborations in documentary and new digital media for a third digital documentary practice that provides space for new projects on race and online culture, indigeneity and virtuality, and on ethics and digital publics. Overall, this dissertation contributes to and expands the field of autoethnographic media production while critically considering and harnessing digital and Internet technologies as viable creative, cultural and social tools with unique discursive potentials.