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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.