R04b


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Speculative Filmmaking: Expanding Ethnography 
Convenors:
Michele Feder-Nadoff (Journal of Embodied Research)
Ben Spatz (University of Huddersfield)
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Format:
Roundtable
Sessions:
Monday 6 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London

Short Abstract:

This interdisciplinary roundtable will re-imagine a generative and speculative anthropology through discussion of how filmmaking processes expand scholarship. Participants will address how video-researchers can become active agents in world-building through video-film practices.

Long Abstract:

This roundtable will re-imagine a more "generative" and "speculative" anthropology (Grimshaw and Ravitz, Ingold) through discussion of how filmmaking processes expand scholarship. Participants will address how video-researchers can become active agents in world-building through video-film practices.

In the past, visual anthropology's struggle for legitimacy as a research method resulted in a lack of scholarly analysis of filmmaking process. But, today, video and film have become normalized communication modes. Media has gained traction as part of the multimodal and experimental ethnographic turn. Its popularity is also due to the growing rapprochement between anthropology and art. Despite this fervor collaboration between anthropologists, ethnographers and experimental filmmakers is lacking. Visual anthropology would benefit through discourse with these newer interdisciplinary videographers exploring the convergence of the digital with embodied aural-visual-somatic-haptic practices.

Despite video's increased popularity, the study of "making of video" is still needed (Grimshaw 2018). Video breaches the divide between concept and praxis; it is both "mode" of research and a "medium." Video is material and immaterial, yet imminently malleable. How do these "exploratory films" create more intimate subject-directed studies? How does film-editing extend ethnographic observation and analysis? How can study of these processes hone non-linear ways of knowing and transmitting multiple worlds? How might video more directly involve research subjects as agents? This interdisciplinary roundtable will bring together anthropologists and practice-based researchers to debate these questions.

Accepted contributions:

Session 1 Monday 6 March, 2023, -
Roundtable Video visible to paid-up delegates