SPOTLIGHT – Summer School on Documentary Filmmaking in Social Sciences

Event: Summer School

Location: NEC & fieldwork in Bucharest

21-28 September 2025, Bucharest

SPOTLIGHT Audiovisual capturing of dynamics of place attachment and identity in Central and Eastern Europe – Summer school on documentary filmmaking in social sciences is organized by Centre for Governance and Culture in Europe, University of St. Gallen (GCE-HSG), New Europe College (NEC), “I.L. Caragiale” National University of Theatre and Cinematography (UNATC), Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (unibz), University of Opole (UO), FORTHEM Diversity and Migration Lab UO and Moving.Lab.

The program of the public events within the summer school will be posted in due time.

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The one-week-long, on-site summer school is dedicated to exploring the potential of documentary filmmaking for social science research and dissemination. It offers an intensive, practice-based learning experience which will acquaint the participants with audio-visual research methods and collaborative ethnographic filmmaking.

Audiovisual media production and attention to sensoriality help overcome text-centric approaches in research. By including sound, rhythm, composition, performance, texture, and nonverbal communication, it reveals knowledge arguably different from the text: ways of dwelling concern bodily perceptions in space, emotions, and sensory experience, which may all be better represented using the unique tools offered by working with film. Videography, moreover, allows for the establishment of an alternative communication platform during fieldwork, later with the audience, and with time as a (re)presentation of the historical, ideological period it belongs to. Visual methods are one of the possible instruments to overcome obstacles related to one-dimensional mono-rhetorical narratives, as they can bring back “muted” histories.

The fourth edition will make use of this potential to explore more-than-human worlds in the city. The potential of audio-visual to move beyond writing and words is especially promising when considering communication and entanglement with the non-human.