Paper short abstract:

Drawing on recent audiovisual practices that articulate collaborative approaches with migrants, this paper questions modes of knowledge production and proposes non-textual representations as means of disseminating lived experiences of the migration crisis.

Paper long abstract:

This communication considers participatory approaches as means of generating intersubjective dialogue, in order to include perceptions and epistemologies of those who are experiencing the migratory crisis.

This paper will consider the research and practices in between ethnography and cinema that the author has audiovisually articulated in recent years. On the one hand, through his film Kales, a collaborative audiovisual work in the Calais camp, whereby living on a daily basis with migrants and proposing a participatory approach (images and stories partly produced by migrants), a film was born which provides an interior and sensory evocation of the social life of migrants. And on the other hand, the film We Others, in which the collaboration was continued after the dismantling of the camp, by making a feature film between fiction and documentary which proposes a collaborative process with contemporary migrants who embody and appropriate the stories of European emigration from the past and cross them with their own migratory experiences. An inclusive audiovisual anthropology project that mixes temporalities and stories in order to question the historical amnesia linked to the migration crisis.

By mixing film extracts, theoretical references and poems of migrants, this communication also addresses the question of

plurality of contemporary worlds and therefore of non-textual writing as a mode of dissemination of lived (ethnographic) experiences.

Paper short abstract:

What is co-production, if not a form of amateurism? This paper takes inspiration from KinoKlub Zagreb’s commitment to amateur filmmaking in reflecting on two recent co-production projects, in London and in Zagreb, and looking forward to new research in the area.

Paper long abstract:

“An amateur film is a film that is made out of love…” So states Vedran Šuvar, onetime president of KinoKlub Zagreb, a group that has been making experimental and all other varieties of films since 1928. What is co-production, if not a form of amateurism?

This paper will discuss two participatory filmmaking projects: For the first, COVID Chronicles, I worked closely with a small number of migrants and local activists in the London borough of Haringey to co-create three short films about their experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, I worked to make the process as collaborative as possible but was ultimately responsible for the results. The second was far more open, in that I acted as a workshop leader and co-mentor to teams of local amateur filmmakers at KinoKlub Zagreb. The topics addressed in these films varied widely. What we primarily shared across projects was a lack of time and expertise to make the films we wanted to realize.

In this talk, I sit with these frustrations – common concerns of incompetence – not in hopes of overcoming them, but to reflect on the value of participatory and multimodal practice, as a way to embrace and expand principles and practices of amateurism for new communities, and as a possibility for re-envisioning visual anthropology.

Paper short abstract:

Based on reflections of different people involved in a collaborative film project conducted in the summer of 2023 in Wuhan and Shenzhen, this paper discusses the (ethical) dilemmas and questions raised through co-producing a short documentary entitled "Baby Stress in China".

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I discuss the dilemmas and questions raised through co-producing a short documentary entitled Baby Stress in China (2024) with an anonymous interlocutor-turned-researcher in China. The project, conducted in the summer of 2023 in Wuhan and Shenzhen, involved research participants in the research process and started from my interlocutors’ most widely shared common concerns: Should I have a baby? How? When? Exploring these questions together by collaborating on a visual project shed new light on the gendered social dynamics behind China’s rapidly decreased birth rate. However, the method also raises questions about how relevant research questions are formulated and by who? How do inequalities and relations of power play out within the context of collaborative research projects? What are the ethical questions that need to be considered in this type of research, for example, in relation to research credit and anonymity?

Based on reflections of different people involved in this film project, including the collaborative partner, people who were filmed for the project, and myself, this paper investigates how participatory, visual methods can contribute to making anthropological research more equitable and democratic, as well as increasing the discipline’s mobilizing force by making the insights it reaps accessible for a broad public.

Paper short abstract:

This article explores the diverse collective experience of nine women researchers in Portugal, through a collaborative video project. Here the camera is merely the means through which we access embodied experiences and the variegated stages of our academic work and careers.

Paper long abstract:

This article explores the diverse collective experience of nine women researchers in Portugal, through a collaborative video project. Here the camera is merely the means through which we access embodied experiences related to motherhood, migration, homemaking, political engagement, and the variegated stages of our academic work and careers. Despite our differences, and throughout the filming (in its planning, execution and derushing phases) we discovered a profound connection through our shared identity as both women and researchers.

From the narrow interstices of life, our collaborative video effort resulted in a short film. In an effort of demigrantising migration studies, this project proved successful in bringing together both migrant and Portuguese female academics to create alternative futures together. Yet it is precisely these multiple viewpoints that unveil the importance of presence, the potential of solidarity and the complexity of resisting persisting power relations at university and the precarization of academia.

Drawing inspiration from our individual narratives, we joined forces (and part of our lives) to create a film beyond mere documentation. It became a medium of sharing, a canvas for collective expression, capturing the essence of our multifaceted identities as women in and beyond academia. The rhythms, sounds, and images superpose to create a poetic manifesto. In essence, this article serves as a reflection on the intricate patchwork (Cardoso et al., 2021) of our collective narrative - a narrative woven with threads of shared (i)mobilities, struggles and resistances, resilience, and the beauty found in embracing the complexity of our in-between spaces.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation is based on a research project, the final product of which is the book: Tirando el Corte: Cine Comunitario y Antropología Audiovisual.The results will be presented from a child and youth perspective on the representation of territories through the creation of participatory films.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation is based on a research project, the final product of which is the book: "Tirando el Corte: Cine Comunitario y Antropología Audiovisual", financed by the Ministry of Cultures and Arts of Chile.The results will be presented from a child and youth perspective on the representation of territories through the creation of participatory films.

Community cinema is proposed as an object of study for audiovisual anthropology, both because of the participatory methodologies it includes and because of the films it produces, which express alterities that have had limited access to self-representation.

Among its methodologies, Community Cinema proposes a horizontal perspective, where facilitators and participants share knowledge for an audiovisual production. No role is more relevant than another, promoting integrality and the value of collaboration. As a collective practice, this type of cinema strengthens community ties and regenerates the social fabric (Zirión, 2015),promoting productions that make Chile's problems visible.

From its languages, Community Cinema emerges as a device to promote critical reflections on what affects the people who inhabit the territories, thus the approach of Common Concerns (Xiang, 2022) acquires strength and value, since through the creation of participatory audiovisual pieces, concerns that are multiplied and repeated throughout the territory are filmed. This disposition allows analyzing Community Cinema as a discursive proposal that politically represents marginalized, underrepresented or ignored collectivities (Gumucio Dragón, 2014).

The hypothesis is that Community Cinema fosters reflexivity among the participating communities, since it promotes communicative processes that include the perspectives of those who live these realities.

Paper short abstract:

In this presentation I discuss my attempts to develop a visual anthropology of cycling and cycling city-making. Based on research in Vienna, I discuss how I use filmmaking and film elicitation to investigate what drives people to transform themselves and others into cyclists.

Paper long abstract:

Since the reports of a global “bicycle boom” in the pandemic year 2020, I have started to observe what happens in initiatives that promote sustainable urban mobility. This line of research has so far included participant observation in Vienna’s lively bicycle advocacy scene, meetings with cyclists and cycling activists in other cities, and experiment with different approaches to filmmaking and film elicitation in spaces where people meet around the bicycle. In this presentation I discuss the short research film Women on the Move (Helen Vaaks 2023), which I use as a prompt in elicitation interviews with the trainers and learners of cycling courses in Vienna to discover what drives them to transform themselves and others into cyclists, which questions matter to them and what their interests in the topic are. The film was recorded in 2022 in collaboration with members of the Viennese cycling school FahrSicherRad and the social organization Caritas Wien.

The method of elicitation has a long history in visual anthropology as a tool of co-interpreting situations and co-evaluating and re-editing films. Drawing on the recently articulated common concerns approach, I suggest that the method can also be productively used as a tool of investigating common concerns in the exploratory stage of a research project.

Paper short abstract:

Our documentary, where children interview their peers about their experiences of 2023 Turkey earthquakes, attests to participatory filmmaking’s unique power and potential limitations in communicating common concerns and integrating children to ethnographic research as active producers of knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

On February 6, 2023, Southeastern Turkey was hit by two earthquakes of magnitudes 7.8 and 7.6, resulting in the tragic loss of over 50,000 lives. I was caught by the earthquakes at the epicenter, Antep, as I was pursuing my ethnographic dissertation research that explores children’s experiences amidst the authoritarian takeover in Turkey.

Prompted by the stark disparity between sensationalized portrayals of childhood in political and humanitarian frameworks and the actual experiences, needs, and hopes of children in the aftermath of the earthquakes, a group of my young interlocutors found themselves perplexed. In response, driven by a collective urgent need to depict the disaster from children’s perspective, my interlocutors and I initiated “All at Once: Children of Antep Narrate the February 6th” documentary film project. For this ongoing project, we collectively pursue children whose names appear on a student list from a severely damaged school. We record children’s accounts of the reconfiguration of the city-space through urbanization projects predating the earthquakes; their experiences of loss, grief, and reconstruction; and their future aspirations. Our documentary project also involves an appendix titled “Endnote to ‘All at Once’” chronicling –through the photographs and voice-memos I have been collecting– children’s arduous yet healing experiences of collaboratively developing and executing this project. Our documentary attests to the merits of participatory filmmaking, particularly in dismantling hierarchies between adult researchers and young research participants by engaging them as co-producers of knowledge. However, our “appendix” in particular, also sheds light on potential tensions involved in such collaborative efforts.

Paper short abstract:

The former Portuguese colony of Macau observes the 25th anniversary of its Handover to China in 2024. Blending film analysis, postcolonial history, and ethnographic fieldwork spanning a decade, the author introduces methods to decolonize the ethnographic gaze in cinema studies and anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

The fields of cinema studies and anthropology intersect in complex ways. In anthropology, films and videos often double as ethnographic documentation, especially of non-Western societies and communities of color. However, as Rey Chow argues in her classic work _Primitive Passions_, such audiovisual media tends to reinforce the ethnographic gaze in the process. Whereas Chow concludes with the call to reclaim the ethnographic gaze for cinematic self-representation, I proceed differently by analyzing how ethnographic fieldwork can be repurposed as a tool in the study of film and space.

This paper introduces a decolonial approach to ethnographic research, focusing on the former Portuguese colony of Macau as a case study. Observing the 25th anniversary of its Handover to China in 2024, Macau has seen an acceleration in urban and infrastructural development in recent years, from the reclaimed landmass known as the “Cotai Strip” to plans integrating it into an economic zone called the Greater Bay Area (Yue Gang Ao Dawanqu). This drastic transformation of Macau’s social and spatial fabric was reflected in Pang Ho-cheung’s award-winning film _Isabella_, which won a Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. In the paper, I explain how I blend film interpretation, postcolonial history, and ethnographic fieldwork in Macau spanning over a decade. I will introduce the “ethnographic drift” as a novel method to decolonize the ethnographic gaze in cinema studies and anthropology.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how participatory film can communicate the relations between the material histories and local meanings of place and community alongside the UK's nuclear industry. It examines the role of infrastructural presences in how proximate publics make sense of their industrial past.

Paper long abstract:

The paper anticipates the use of participatory film as part of a wider methodology, including archival and ethnographic work, in developing a politics of communication between core and periphery communities in the UK's nuclear industry. The core community is the scientists, the policy-makers and the bureaucratic workers, while the periphery pertains to communities that host nuclear infrastructure like power stations and waste and storage facilities, as well as workers who build the infrastructure.

It takes into consideration the relations between the material histories and presences of energy industries more generally to suggest how multiple meanings of place and community can be formed. It recognises the affects present in infrastructural presences (and absences) in how proximate publics make sense of their industrial past, and the significance of this for their hopes and expectations about the future. 

This temporal focus also comes to the fore in how communication is conceived. What is the relationship between the temporalities of materials and the temporalities of people who live alongside them? How can our knowledge systems conceive of the deep time of nuclear materials? This paper offers novel approaches to the use of participatory film in conceiving of nuclear temporalities by drawing on film-influences theories of time and Bakhtin's literary notion of the chronotope.