*CFP* "EXPANDING THE FRAME: ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM AND ITS OTHERS", PANEL AT 16TH RAI FILM FESTIVAL & CONFERECE

Precarious landscapes: forensis and decolonial futures 

a panel at the 16th Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival & Conference

Expanding the Frame: Ethnographic Film and its Others

March 27 - 30, 2019 - The Watershed, Bristol, UK

Convenors: Daryl Celeste Meador (New York University), Toma Peiu (University of Colorado Boulder)

This panel will be discussing the practicalities and ethics of producing images and sound in vulnerable landscapes. Work coming from ethnographers and media artists researching border areas, diasporas and environmentally, politically or economically exposed geographies is expected to challenge notions of centrality and subalternity.

Between Hito Steyerl’s poor image, Eyal Weizman’s forensis and Michael D. Jackson’s existentiality, this panel will be juxtaposing case studies of experimental artwork resulted from ethnographically-minded collaboration with protagonists from the periphery, and / or based in vulnerable geographies. Sites of precarious movement and migration often intersect with shifting landscapes in an era of globalized capitalism. These may include everydays transformed by the extraction economy, the enforcement of international borders, conflict, environmental vulnerability and Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence”, the experience of asylum or migration. We welcome papers and project presentations that critically interrogate and / or expand normative forms of representation and documentation in such sites.

In light of ever-increasing inequality, what is the future of ethnographic media practice? Under the siege of an institutionalized flow of descriptive immersivity and graphic imagery, is representation obsolete – if it’s not, what work is being done to give it renewed meaning? Could decolonial aestheSis (“a sensation of touch” – Mignolo/Vazquez 2013), provide an afterlife for ethnography? Panelists should critically address the connection between their methodologies and their sites of study; but also that between the technology they use (360 imagery, celluloid film, digital / sound mapping or oral history), their protagonists and the works resulted from this process – in writing or other media.

Deadline: January 6th, 2019

Submit a proposal via online form.

For any questions, contact us at dcm395@nyu.edu; toma.peiu@colorado.edu