Ethnographic Film – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Workshop: Doing ethnographic film in global and multilingual contexts, 7 June 2019, 9 am – 5 pm, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK. Deadline: 1 May 2019.

This cross-disciplinary one-day workshop offers a creative space in which researchers will share their experiences of, and ambitions for, film as visual method in ethnography. Presentations will consider ethnographic film as research output, as research method for data elicitation, and as research method for data analysis. The workshop will engage with the potential of film as a collaborative method, exploring partnerships between ethnographers and film-makers, and between researchers and researched. Examples of research in which visual methods in ethnography are employed will include multimodal languaging between deaf and hearing people,internationally mobile deaf people’s diverse communicative practices, translanguaging in city markets, and gesture-based communication in sport. The workshop will examine the challenges of ethnographic film-making in global contexts. It will also reflect on potential limitations of the use of film in ethnographic research.

Participation in the workshop will be limited to 20 places. Participants will be researchers experienced in the use of film in ethnography, those in the early stages of ethnographic film work, and researchers planning to engage in ethnographic film. Discussion will be stimulated by presentations which present examples of film in ethnography. The presentations will focus on three aspects of ethnographic film: Film as research output, Film for data analysis, Film for data elicitation (eg. audience reception). Following the presentations, a roundtable discussion session will engage with key questions.

Presenters: Adrian Blackledge (University of Stirling), Angela Creese (University of Stirling), Erin Moriarty Harrelson (Heriot-Watt University), Andrew Irving (University of Manchester), Annelies Kusters (Heriot-Watt University).

British Sign Language – English interpretation will be provided

Register by 1 May 2019, by emailing Annelies Kusters – please write a few lines about your background and/or experience with ethnographic film, and what you hope to gain from this workshop. This will help organizers prepare the roundtable discussion.

KANRAXËL: The Confluence of Agnack makes rural multilingualism visible by focusing on a city in Senegal where speaking 6 languages is not uncommon. Places like Agnack defy common conceptualisations of multilingualism, which tend to assume it is both modern and urban. Extensive discussion about the project and its implications has been made available, as are teaching materials both for secondary and university students.

In 2015, the film won the AHRC research in film award in the category “Best film produced by a researcher or research team in the last year.” The jury’s verdict states: this is “a beautifully filmed and scripted film… a highly sophisticated film, beautifully shot, cut, and recorded, which conveys the nature of multilingual life in the village very effectively indeed.”