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Short abstract

This paper presents relational filmmaking as a decolonial, participatory method emphasizing ethics of engagement. It explores how collaborative audiovisual practices foster equitable knowledge co-production, resist extractive paradigms, and amplify marginalized voices.

Long abstract

This paper proposes relational filmmaking as a decolonial, participatory method that challenges extractive forms of anthropological research and the dominance of written dissemination. Drawing on long-term, collaborative audiovisual fieldwork, relational filmmaking foregrounds shared process, ethical negotiation, and ongoing dialogue between researcher and participants. It engages filmmaking not as documentation, but as an epistemological and political practice where knowledge is co-produced through co-presence, improvisation, and embodied interaction.

Building on Faye Ginsburg’s “embedded aesthetics” (1994), the practice of coinvolvement (2018), and Audra Simpson’s notion of “ethnographic refusal” (2014), this approach intervenes in the visual regime of anthropology by centering the terms and rhythms of engagement as determined with, not for, collaborators. It reconfigures authorship, authority, and temporality in the research encounter, resisting the fixity of text-bound representations.

As an early career researcher, I reflect on the tensions between embodied, affective, and situated fieldwork and the challenge of translating such experience into conventional academic outputs. Relational filmmaking insists that the process is the knowledge, raising questions about where and how that knowledge can live and be recognized within academic structures.

This paper contributes to conversations on practice-based knowledge by showing how relational filmmaking can amplify marginalized voices - not by speaking about them but by co-creating space with them. It advocates for multimodal scholarship that is not only inclusive in content but also structurally transformative in how knowledge is produced, circulated, and valued.