Paper short abstract:

To explain China's growing power in a nuanced way, this film project reinserts the "I" in IR by explaining macro issues of imperialism, war, and development through an exploration of the micro issues of the personal experiences of three generations in my family in China (1924-present).

Paper long abstract:

How can one explain to a general audience the complex global politics of China's growing power without resorting to Orientalizing stereotypes? One way is to reinsert the "I" in IR to explain macro issues of imperialism, war, and development through an exploration of the micro issues of personal experiences in China. I aim to do this in my current book/film project, "Family Business: Three Generations of Americans in China," which traces the stories of my Great Uncle Chuck, who lived the high life in Shanghai as a businessman (1924-49); my father, who witnessed the Chinese civil war as a sailor in the US Navy in Qingdao (1947-48); and me, who saw the opening up of a closed when I studied in Beijing (1985-86). My family's peculiar affective experiences in China reflect, inform, and participate in the global structures and ideologies of empire, capitalism, and development. This nexus between family and global history inspired a combination of methodologies using observational cinema and archival footage to make a film that juxtaposes the testimony of these three characters with broader narratives of China's past to put personal experience in conversation with histories of the broader social and political context. The protagonists' cross-cultural friendships underline how person-to-person relationships can avoid the traps of hierarchical self/Other relations because they value difference more than demand sameness. Thus one's personal experience can become a vector for critically examining the rise of China in ways that appeal to a general audience.

Paper short abstract:

I look at how the task of positioning myself whilst doing research with my aging grandparents, productively shaped the form and findings of my research, and explore how ethical considerations necessary for filming someone with dementia, helped me make sense of seemingly incommensurable spheres.

Paper long abstract:

Navigating between the different roles of a researcher or family member can be complicated when filming those closest to us. In this presentation, I look at how the task of positioning myself whilst doing research with my aging grandparents shaped the form and findings of my research. Further, I explore how ethical considerations necessary for filming someone with dementia, helped me make sense of the complicated spheres that separates sanity and insanity, truth and lie, reality and fiction. My case study is my feature-length documentary film Half Elf (2020), which is about my grandparents, Hulda and Trausti, both recently deceased. When I was making this film, they had been sharing their lives on Icelandic shores for over seventy years. As Trausti’s one-hundredth birthday nears, he begins to search for a coffin and is eager to change his name to Elf while Hulda tells him to move to a hotel, because she does not know of any Elf. He bursts out singing while she wants him to stop screaming. The process of filming this story and editing a narrative demanded constant negotiation between what I know as rational and emotional, closeness and distance, familiar and mysterious. The way I have found peace was by merging the more pragmatic enterprise of producing a film with a poetic approach to using the camera. Filmmaking here allowed for a way of bridging seemingly incommensurable spheres revealing what it means to be human at the end of a fulfilled life.

Paper short abstract:

Black Snow folds into itself three transitional quests: a retiring sculptor creating a final masterpiece; a deprived community showing its resilience; and a council-house kid/Deleuzian management professor coming to terms with his conflicted history in making a film about a long-forgotten disaster.

Paper long abstract:

Life is a series of non-events that may, in their ordinariness, be extraordinary. But events are more than what happens - they creep up on us and suddenly things change, irrevocably, like desert rain. History often records the drama of "event" but not the swirling before and after minutiae, the elusive ambiguities where life is lived. The past can haunt us and the future emerge from it in a gesture, a breath, a sound: a non-textual rhizome that Stewart senses and articulates rather than captures, an affect that Lingis emotes. These are ethnographers of intensity, of vulnerability, of time as lived and endured rather than measured; for whom text is a limited medium to engage with affect. Film, via Bergson and Deleuze, is a much better way of engaging with and evoking polysemous and polyvocal social experience. But the struggle to get it accepted as a research medium in its own right is in its early days in management studies, where realist ontologies and functionalist epistemologies remain dominant.

My "method" has developed from arts-based approaches rather than social science: films as critically affective performative texts interweave aesthetic, poetic, ethical and political moments. Ethnographic skills become a resource for blending and disappearing into the narratives of others - not for spurious objectivity, but to let theory and practice work together to engage their audience. In this film, archives, VAR and mine rescuers are "screened" to engage the audience corporeally in a shared evocation bridging both a past and a present.