Poetics and Politics Documentary Research Symposium, May 15-17th, 2015

“As was the case at the 2013 conference, the Poetics and Politics conference will provide an invaluable context for documentary-based research that both troubles and reinvigorates the discrepant categories of scholarly “theory” and cultural “practice.” The symposium invites participants whose work frames, historicizes, or embodies questions about the various possible relations of theory to practice in documentary research”.

FRIDAY MAY 15, 2015 DARC 108
6:00- 6:30pm WELCOME and OPENING REMARKS
6:30-8:00pm EPISTEMOLOGIES OF PRAXIS (Sharon Daniel, Hope Tucker, Pratap Rughani)
This panel gathers practitioners whose documentary work provide key provocations for this symposium. Interrogating and problematising how documentary epistemologies and meanings are constructed, this panel raises specific approaches for demystifying documentary-making as a practice of visible evidence. Questions considered by this panel include: the scope of documentary practice in the ‘fourth world’; documentary materiality as a source for relaying narratives of unresolved environmental disaster; and the ethical (consent) and aesthetic/affective concerns in documentary-making processes that involve asymmetric power relations between makers and subjects. The panel offers pathways for understanding reflexive praxis as a source of competing historical and affective epistemologies, more than simply a move to deconstruct the documentary artefact. Through this, the panel situates how documentary-making as a socio-historical and psycho-social practice intervenes in contemporary geo-political scenarios.

Poetics & Politics Abstracts and Programme

University of California, Santa Cruz USA