Paty Godoy, Oriol Puig and Santiago Giraldo were the guests of the fourth session of the UAB Planet Cycle, an initiative of the Gabinete de Comunicación y Educación aimed at students of its master’s degrees.
This cycle of conferences is part of the project “Planet UAB: The journey to the other – equals in differences” organised by the UAB Cabinet during the academic year 2020-2021, with the support of the Solidarity Fund of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, which organised a series of activities and awareness-raising actions based on the concept of the UAB campus as a “planet” and which dealt with major issues such as the culture of peace, sustainability, the environment and interculturality, among others.
Students from the Master’s in Travel Journalism, the Master’s in Environmental Communication and the Master’s in Communication and Education participated in this fourth session with journalists Paty Godoy, Oriol Puig and Santiago Giraldo, who presented their respective projects.
Paty Godoy , journalist and documentary filmmaker, spoke to the students about her ‘Los desiertos de Sonora‘, an interactive web documentary and transmedia project produced by Altaïr Magazine that presents “a physical, literary, intellectual and sentimental journey” through the Atlas of the Sonoran Desert, located in the northwest of Mexico. The product of three years of work and four displacements between 2015 and 2018, it follows in the footsteps of the protagonists of the novel The Savage Detectives (1998) by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.
Oriol Puig, PhD in Social Anthropology and lecturer in the Department of Journalism at the UAB, then showed extracts from the report ‘Tombes de sorra‘ (Tombs of sand) of which he is co-director, together with journalist Hibai Arbide Aza. This work, which was broadcast on the TV3 channel’s 30 minutes programme, deals with the migratory routes that cross the Sahara desert and the involvement of the Republic of Niger and European policies in the deportation processes. This journalistic piece presents numerous testimonies, giving voice to “victims of growing obstacles implemented by the European Union, in collaboration with African governments, to stop the arrival of migrants on its coasts”. It also analyses the causes and consequences of these policies.
Finally, Santiago Giraldo, lecturer at the UAB Department of Journalism, presented his work ‘Berracas. Surviving the conflict to build peace‘. a documentary that brings together the testimony of different women survivors of the armed conflict in Colombia. For two years, a team of journalists from Barcelona and Colombia investigated the armed conflict in the country, its memory and the work of women in peace-building. The result was this documentary, a travelling multimedia exhibition, a report and ten profiles of women social leaders from different parts of Colombian society.
