For the last twenty-five years, technology has had a profound influence on knowledge production, meaning-making, and learning. Recognizing a shift in how knowledge is produced, disseminated, and consumed, academics across disciplines are incorporating multiple forms of media in their research, from digital recordings used for data collection to coding software used for data analysis. Moreover the decreasing costs of personal computing, the accessibility of multimedia hardware and software, and the rise of broadband communication networks, has transformed traditional scholarly communication. However, the legitimacy of this medium as a form of social scientific scholarship continues to be debated. In part, this may be due to the lack of guidelines or conventions for what constitutes academic film and how multimedia contributes to knowledge and scholarly production.
The 1st Annual Penn CAMRA and GSE Films Screening Scholarship Media Festival brings these new research representations to the forefront, calling for rigorous academic research that uses film and multimedia. The festival provides the space and begins the work of creating an interdisciplinary scholarly community at Penn to present and explore such projects. This festival is open to scholars, filmmakers, educators, instructors, knowledge producers in image and sound, and innovators who are interested in thinking about media and its changing relation to knowledge production, our understanding of the world, and educational outcomes. We hope to articulate the various affordances of film and multimedia as data, as an analytical tool, and as a representation form. We ask all those who participate to help us collectively address the following questions:
What are the affordances and possibilities of multimedia with respect to storytelling, knowledge production, and/or social science research?
How do these diverse media forms of research representation change what we conceptualize as research and, more broadly, scholarly knowledge?
Submissions are open for research-oriented films and innovative digital projects (websites, soundscapes, iBooks, etc) that examine and analyze learning processes and/or education more broadly across cultures and contexts.
To learn rules for submission please go here.
To submit to the festival, please go here.
