The Bondy Blog: My city will stay

As part of the educational and cultural initiatives " Support for occasional artistic and cultural education (EAC)" and "Once upon a time, there was my highschool", launched by the Île-de-France region for high school students, Bétonsalon - center for art and research proposes a tour in collaboration with the Bondy Blog. The project is based on the ambition to work collectively on a textual and visual device for rewriting stories, rumors and urban legends.

"My city will stay" is imagined by the Bondy Blog as a participative column for high school students, designed to initiate media education. During five sessions conducted with the STMG junior class of the Lycée Julie-Victoire Daubié (journalist and first woman to obtain the baccalaureate in 1861), the questions of the journalist profession, the manufacture of the information, the relationship of each person to the media and social networks, but also and especially their city, Argenteuil, were discussed in turn.

Combining times of discussion and debate on current events, Latifa Oulkhouir, director of the Bondy Blog, allowed high school students to critically read the information they consume: diversifying and comparing its sources while constantly questioning the reliability of the press, this was the first step in each of the first three sessions. Then came the time for writing.

In order to become aware of the richness of their daily lives, Latifa suggested to the students that they approach, through writing, themes that are close to their individual hearts and linked to their neighbourhood. From this collection of memories was born the realization of a short film punctuated by stories intertwining personal stories and the history of the city in the setting of the school.

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PRESENTATION
Bondy Blog is an online medium created at the time of the urban revolts of November 2005, the Bondy Blog aims to give a voice to the inhabitants of working class neighbourhoods. This objective - telling the daily story of those who are not heard or whose voices are distorted, stigmatized, in a minority – is pursued by opening its editorial office to some twenty reporters, and not only professionals but also journalists in training, in search of employment, at the beginning of their careers or even retired, forming a team whose second vocation is media education.

Since 2007, the Bondy Blog has been organizing masterclasses run by media professionals and open to all. In 2009, the Bondy Blog initiated the creation of a "equal opportunity preparation" class for journalism school entrance exams dedicated to scholarship students, in partnership with the École de Journalisme de Lille. Finally, since 2013, the Bondy Blog reporters have been speaking at schools across France to raise young people’s awareness of the media, making them observers of their own reality, encouraging them to step back and become once again the actors of their lives.

Since January 1st, 2019, the Bondy Blog has been headed by Latifa Oulkhouir, director, and Ilyes Ramdani, editor-in-chief.