DOCUMENTARY, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND RESEARCH
STANTON WORTHAM, JOHN JACKSON, AMITANSHU DAS — FALL 2011 AND SPRING 2012
This course considered filmmaking/videography as a medium for presenting academic research to scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. The two-semester course was driven by a few guiding questions/concerns:
What can film/video bring to the qualitatively observational social sciences?
What problems arise from the deployment of such technologies as mechanisms for seeing/representing socio-cultural data? Where do historically established and prevailing norms and practices of filmmaking and cinematic communication converge and diverge from the needs of academic presentation?
What are some of the more and less compelling ways of incorporating film/video work into qualitative research?
Can we use film as a medium to represent truly academic research of the sort communicated in the best books and journal articles?
Could we produce “visual archives” in the social sciences that would allow ethnographic/scholarly representations produced in film/video to occupy (without anxiety) a place alongside books and journal articles as valuable vehicles for the demonstration and dissemination of social scientific research?
What would/could a film- or video-based academic dissertation look like?
The course includes an intensive filmmaking component, and thus it meets twice a week. One weekly session will be devoted to rigorous training in digital filmmaking technique, technology and production.
This course considered filmmaking/videography as a medium for presenting academic research to scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. The two-semester course was driven by a few guiding questions/concerns:
What can film/video bring to the qualitatively observational social sciences?
What problems arise from the deployment of such technologies as mechanisms for seeing/representing socio-cultural data? Where do historically established and prevailing norms and practices of filmmaking and cinematic communication converge and diverge from the needs of academic presentation?
What are some of the more and less compelling ways of incorporating film/video work into qualitative research?
Can we use film as a medium to represent truly academic research of the sort communicated in the best books and journal articles?
Could we produce “visual archives” in the social sciences that would allow ethnographic/scholarly representations produced in film/video to occupy (without anxiety) a place alongside books and journal articles as valuable vehicles for the demonstration and dissemination of social scientific research?
What would/could a film- or video-based academic dissertation look like?
The course includes an intensive filmmaking component, and thus it meets twice a week. One weekly session will be devoted to rigorous training in digital filmmaking technique, technology and production.
