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.

Please read more at: 2022spotlight.wixsite.com

The final short films will be screened on Saturday, 27 September 2025, from 7 pm at the UNATC cinema hall (Matei Voievod 75-77).
The screening is open to the public; attendance is free.
The screening of the short documentaries will be followed by a conversation/Q&A.

 Photo credit © Michał Wanke