Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects my personal journey as an activist scholar, teacher and an ‘embedded’ ethnographer of my own society and discusses the ways in which I employed participatory and collective documentary filmmaking in my teaching during the urban conflict in the Kurdish region of Turkey in 2016.

Paper long abstract:

The Kurdish region of Turkey was turned into a war zone following the termination of the peace negotiations between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), in 2015. The ensuing conflicts resulted in the death of more than 2,000 civilians and the forced displacement of half a million Kurds. Amid all the chaos, I was conducting an ethnographic fieldwork on youth radicalisation across the Turkish-Syrian border areas and teaching anthropology at a newly established provincial University in Bingöl. Both my work and teaching suffered from the consequences of the on-going turmoil, which rendered the classical approaches to my tasks obsolete. In the spring of 2016, I brought seven of my students together, all from distinctive political and ethnic backgrounds reflective of Turkey’s diversity, for an extracurricular activity, a reading group. The idea was to create a platform for a group of students with conflicting ideologies to have a meaningful discussion on contemporary issues and political violence. In two contrasting spaces, outside in nature and inside my living room, students who inhabit conventionally opposing identities and values on topics such as governing laws, civil rights, gender roles, and racial profiling, committed to discuss freely and learn from each other. My ethnographic film, the Seven Doors, which received the Jean Rouch Award in 2020, documents these encounters and transformations. In this paper, I will be reflecting on the critical and radical pedagogies I employed in this reading group, and the ways in which I benefitted from filmmaking in my teaching.

Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the generative potential of critical pedagogy to teach ethnographic media. Building upon Anne-Ruth Wertheim, Jane Rendell and bell hooks, I engage with the political responsibilities we have as educators of ethnographic media.

Paper long abstract:

This paper traces the generative potential of critical pedagogy to teach ethnographic media. Building upon Anne-Ruth Wertheim, Jane Rendell and bell hooks, I challenge the reduction of ethnographic film to epistemological and representational issues by engaging with the affective implications and political responsibilities we have as educators of ethnographic media.

Positioning the radical perspectives and intersectional approaches of interdisciplinary educators within the context of visual anthropology and media studies, I will share strategies and activities to create a community that encourages and facilitates supportive contexts for experimentation, self-organisation, and collaboration. I will do so by sharing experiences from Story Lab - a practice-led master's course for Media Studies students, leading to a co-created open-access curriculum. First run in the spring of 2020, the course works towards a collaborative platform for writing, curating, and producing multimodal and ethnographic media. Story Lab aims to provide a platform for curiosity, generosity, collaboration, experimentation, serendipity, doubt, ambiguity, uncertainty, and, what filmmaker Agnès Varda calls, 'inspiration and good mood'.

Specifically, I will scrutinize the anomalous creatures who call themselves teachers and students, including how we move into and resist read-made roles. How do we allow for a high tolerance of uncertainty - both in the classroom and beyond? What is needed to transition from a static syllabus to a critical and constructive mode of learning that resonates with the sensibilities of ethnography? And how do we break down hierarchies between educators and students - following anthropology's endeavor to challenge power relations between researchers and interlocutors?

Paper short abstract:

Drawing from experiences teaching and learning documentary media, I explore the documentary impulse as a poetic imperative and a site for critical pedagogy. Beyond mere commentary on actuality, I argue that documentary poetics is an ethical praxis directly constitutive of the world itself.

Paper long abstract:

Documentary Media Poetics forms at the intersection of art, social sciences, and pedagogy. Conceived as a course by Daniel Boord in Film Studies, it is now the cornerstone of the documentary concentration in Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder. Documentary media frequently fill gaps in curricula, but they are primarily used as reportage or evidence rather than arts practices with constitutive power. Explicitly pedagogical, Documentary Media Poetics combines theoretical and historical inquiry with production, framed by key concepts in documentary poetry, media of truth, technologies of representation, and ethics.

Throughout the course, these mutually reinforcing modes of thinking unfold across complex ideas to reveal the poetic imperative in the documentary impulse as a creative navigation of values, and of what Paolo Freire termed praxis and the production of conscientização. To this end, documentary media are not used as supplements to the material, but as responsive actions that are constiutive of the material itself. This in turn allows us to use documentary media as tools for acting upon structures that produce our realities, for challenging them, and for making new formations. Documentary Media Poetics become more than journalistic commentary or historical record; they build the world.

As a student of Boord and having taken this class as an undergraduate, I now teach it myself. I offer my experiences of learning and teaching Documentary Media Poetics as a case study for the constitutive power of nonfiction arts practices, for awakening our critical consciousness, and for building a better world.

Paper short abstract:

Documentary practice is inextricably linked to archives and historiography. One just needs to look at the long and rich past of documentary film to see, for example, how both scholars and practitioners have animated the archive by re-narrativizing its fragments, speculating on its omissions and resisting its hegemonic discourses.

Paper long abstract:

Expanding on this tradition, interactive forms of documentary make use of software to explore reconfigurations, new contexts and varied readings of archives and their ideological biases. Furthermore, documentary practitioners employ new tools and technologies to create their own archival systems, often diametrically opposed to the ones that are state-sponsored and/or those that reproduce certain kinds of narratives. Centered on databases, and employing novel interfaces, presentation and navigation methods, interactive documentaries seem to challenge the idea of archive as a static and non-negotiable repository of knowledge. Inherently open-ended, these works engage various forms of community and activist media, correspondence, gestures and impressions mediated by software. This presentation highlights such tendencies and explores the concept of interactive documentary as both an archiving practice and art of collectivism. Using examples from my recent work in Bosnia-Herzegovina, I discuss how these new configurations generate polyphonies over both space and time by calling for sustained engagement with various kinds of records. As a departure point, I put forth the following questions: what are the epistemological and political implications of these kinds of transitions to digital paradigms? In light of rising doubts about democratic potentials of digital media, can interactive docs radically influence the way history is recorded and transmitted? Lastly, through the lens of historical materialism, I consider the role infrastructures, class and economic circumstances play in these alternate forms of archiving and knowledge production.

Paper short abstract:

Documentary and ethnographic artists are often educators too. How do the classroom and "the field" support and nourish one another in our everyday?

Paper long abstract:

Inspired by the authors' early experiences of teaching documentary and ethnographic media, this presentation reflects on the "how" of putting the classroom in conversation with the field, for educators and learners alike. Teaching occupies much of our time as academics and artists, but we seldom address it in our work. How do the classroom and "the field" support and nourish one another in our everyday? How do we teach experience? How can time and space be used imaginatively towards a relational practice of education? Our presentation seeks to open up a conversation about the value of gleaning from experience, teaching dialectically, in the spirit of documentary and ethnography, with inspiration from Turner's "communitas" and Voegel's "rigorous ambiguity."