Contribution short abstract:

This multimodal paper argues that collaboration with people with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) is not about efforts of inclusion, but instead, it is our methodologies that need to be cripped. This multi-modal paper shows this is done through the coproduction of the science-fiction film “O”.

Contribution long abstract:

Participatory, or inclusive, approaches strive to put the voices and experiential expertise of participants with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) at the center of research activities. At the same time, academic standards of what it means to produce knowledge complicate the collaboration with people with MID in scientific practices. Considering the intellectual and discursive nature of research practices, demands of competency and skill exclude possibilities of collaboration with people with MID. Thinking about how to solve this tension, this paper argues that collaboration with people with disabilities is not about efforts of inclusion, but instead, it is our methodologies that need to be “cripped”. This means moving away from the ideal of inclusion towards a more collective, interdependent and relational understanding of access, and of collaboration. This multi-modal paper shows how this is done through the coproduction of the science-fiction film “O”.

Contribution short abstract:

This work analyses the possibilities of collaborative and multi-perspectival digital video in creating affective and non-adult-centred practices in research with children.

Contribution long abstract:

This presentation addresses the ethical and political implications of the use of video as a practice to engage young people and include their experiences and perspectives in academic and artistic research. It looks at the question of how video making can provide spaces to children and young people became active agents in registering and publicizing the long, but poorly documented, history of children’s participation, co-creation, and activism. Although there is a rise in global awareness of children’s activism and agency, there is also an ongoing tendency to commit what Marah Gubar (2018) defines as "aetonormative amnesia", that is, to deliberately relegate young people's political actions to oblivion. This work analyses the possibilities of collaborative and multi-perspectival digital video (Gallagher and Kim, 2008; Balt, 2020; Damasio and Mistry, 2020; Klaue and Zimper, 2020) in creating affective and non-adult-centred practices in qualitative research with children. It discusses how video making co-creation with children can challenge the historical representation of children as “incomplete” and “unfinished”, and their re-imaging and re-imagining “child”, “children” and “childhood”.

Contribution short abstract:

The paper discusses “speculative fictioning”, a practice research methodology for documentary film in order to situate it in a speculative future.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper emerges from my recently submitted practice based PhD dissertation at CREAM (University of Westminster). In my presentation, I will discuss “speculative fictioning”, the methodology developed for making my thesis film, “A Terrible Beauty”. Following Donna Haraway’s open ended concept of ‘sf’, “speculative fictioning” facilitates documentary film to be situated outside its conventional timeframes of past and present, but in a future.

My film has largely been shot in Yiwu (China), the largest wholesale market for small commodities. These goods give shape to an archive of ordinary aspirations and futures, and the city stages an everyday arrangement of immanent futures that may have already arrived. “A Terrible Beauty” falls within the ambit of speculative research and combines practices of fictioning with observational documentary. That the present can be other than what it is, and the future ought to be other than what the present designates it to be requires a speculative sensibility that cuts across thought, action and creation. Speculation is therefore the truth of the future told “aslant”.

I ask how documentary practice speaks to such forms of future making, and explore whether a speculative approach may allow one to think of the latent potentiality of futures that lie outside the binary of the utopian/dystopian framework so that not only do we step into a time ahead, but also look at our time with a critical and yet more compassionate gaze.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper explores a transmedia project investigating the conceptual and mediatised location of a literary adaptation between two researchers, in two countries. It reacts to the proposition of adaptation not only as a creative activity but as a lifeworld.

Contribution long abstract:

I wish to propose a paper on the development of a transmedia project arising from the adaptation of Cafflogion, a dystopian science-fiction novella in the Welsh language by R. Gerallt Jones, published in 1979.

The project in its current form is a reaction to an original scheme to adapt the novella as an ecologically-themed horror film, the plans for which were disrupted – and comprehensively surpassed – by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The encounter with the virus led to a significant reorientation of the project away from a single output to a multiplicity of speculative documents, building a processual account of adaptation as taskscape and multilinear entanglement (Ingold, 2000, 2016), and an archaeology of practice (Pearson and Shanks, 2001).

The various outputs proposed and created so far include translations of the novella, interactions with AI, interactive scripting, 360o/VR filming, the creation of Korsakow documentation and experimentation with vertical filming. However, the specifics of these individual ventures are largely secondary to the creation of a discourse about the place of (the) adaptation in the two co-investigators’ own professional and personal lives.

The project is conducted by Roger Owen (Aberystwyth University) and Dafydd Sills-Jones (Auckland University of Technology), working collaboratively but separately in Wales and New Zealand.

Bibliography:

Ingold, Tim (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Dwelling, Livelihood and Skill. London: Routledge.

(2016) Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge (Routledge Classics).

Jones, R Gerallt (1979) Cafflogion. Cardiff: National Eisteddfod of Wales.

Pearson, Mike and Mike Shanks (2001) Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge.

Contribution short abstract:

I will talk about my research experiences and discoveries made through working with a lens and how they differed from when I conducted my research only using traditional methods. Additionally, I intend to talk about existing migration theories and how they are reflected in the film.

Contribution long abstract:

After publishing a book on Indian migrants in Tokyo (Routledge: 2020) with a chapter focusing on women's lives, I decided to make a documentary about them – 'Finding their niche: Unheard stories of migrant women'.

The protagonists of this documentary are women I had been in contact with since I moved to Japan (2007) and who later were among the interlocutors for my research. At my request in 2020, they agreed to be a part of my film. Looking at their lives through a lens revealed many surprises and other aspects of their life, which, although known to me, had a much more profound impact on my thinking as I worked through the material in the editing room. In making this film, I felt that I attained a deeper understanding of their emotions and their transition from daughters to wives, mothers and migrant workers in a foreign land. Making this feature-length documentary took me back to my past and, collectively, with my protagonists' experiences, led me to rethink the concept of migration.

In this presentation, I would like to reflect on my research experiences without and, later, with the camera. I will also talk about my journey to becoming a filmmaker and aim to reflect on the research experiences and discoveries made through working with a lens and how they differed from when I conducted my research only using traditional methods. Additionally, I intend to talk about existing migration theories and how they are reflected in the film.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper explores how the making of an experimental video essay might mobilize a speculative mode of anthropological inquiry through the body, thereby opening up the (re)interpretive potentiality afforded by multimodal scholarship.

Contribution long abstract:

Despite recent attention to the embodied nature of doing multimodal ethnography, less attention has been given to how the anthropologist’s own body engages in processes of comprehending, interpreting, and critiquing multimodal materials. Reflecting upon a video essay project supported by a multimodal methods course titled Ethnographic Portraiture at the University of Oxford, this paper explores how experimental filmmaking might mobilize a speculative mode of anthropological inquiry (e.g., Willerslev 2011, Ingold 2017) through the body, thereby opening up the (re)interpretive potentiality afforded by multimodal scholarship.

The video essay project under discussion is an analysis of multimodal materials (i.e., video diaries and photo essays) on dancing improvisationally with cameras during COVID-19 lockdowns, as mediated by a sensory anthropological approach. Using her own body to perceptually engage with these multimodal materials, the author attempts to ‘imaginatively empathize with’ (Pink 2011) and creatively speculate upon dancer-videographers’ self-isolation experiences.

The making of a video essay not only documents this reinterpretation process, but also activates a mode of inquiry that extends the speculative potentials inherent in the lived body. By dancing improvisationally with cameras while being recorded by them, the author attunes to and ‘reembod[ies]’ (Kapferer 2013) multilayered sensory experiences evoked by multimodal materials to generate expanded yet nuanced understandings. The speculative scenes emerging from this process enable experimentation with ‘unrealized possibilities’ (Parisi 2012) and analysis of lived realities in an open-ended and critical way. Thus, experimental filmmaking interweaves experiencing with sense-making, observation with imagination, and actuality with potentiality, opening up (re)interpretive possibilities in multimodal anthropology.