Creative Practice and Pedagogy with the Marshall Islands: Navigating a Critical Call-and-Response

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.