TURNING OUT AND TURNING UP: ETHNOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTARY FILM AT THE CROSSROADS

How do anthropologists communicate their research with wider audiences? At a time when insights from social sciences would be most needed to help make sense of our social worlds and our everyday lives while simultaneously the social sciences suffer from funding cuts and increasing disdain within neoliberal societal structures, how do we speak up, how do we tune in? How do we practice a politics of care among our communities and in creating audiences for our research? Audio-visual and multimodal research has re-emerged in the last years as both spaces on which researchers practice and experiment with collaborative ethos and activist sensibilities, as well as works that may assist to communicate social science knowledge. Digital technologies and online infrastructures provide growing possibilities for the production and circulation of ethnographic films and multimodal works, while they also raise questions around issues of diversity and accessibility. In this keynote, I address these questions drawing on my experience as researcher, journal co-editor and festival curator and explore the issues they raise and suggest some ways in which care can be practised in the spaces and the communities of the ethnographic film production and dissemination.

Dr. Christos Varvantakis is a social anthropologist working at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research focuses on childhood, politics, urban cultures and archives, as well as on visual and multimodal research methodologies in the social sciences. He is the head of programming of the Athens Ethnographic Film Festival and co-editor of the journal entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.