Geography and Digital Film - What next?
Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting
Boston April 5-9 2017
The rapid rise of video as the major carrier of digital information online is transforming the way geographers carry
out research and present it to a wider audience. These changes have permeated all levels of teaching and research practice
leading to urgent calls within the discipline to pay more attention to our media literacy (Lukinbeal 2014) as well as contributing to a renewed
scrutiny of the categorisation of video and moving-mage research as a visual method (Jacobs 2016). Today film and video are just as likely to be
considered in the context of an embodied, mobile and multi-sensorial methodology, that can be situated within a multimodal approach (Jewitt and Kress 2003, Jewitt 2015, Pink
2011, Pink & Leder Mackley 2013) or perhaps a more than ‘human’ nonrepresentational context. There is also growing interest in the possibility that approaching filmmaking as a performance-based
activity might help illuminate how all research methods impact on the process of knowledge production.
This session will be divided into a paper and panel session and complement the screening of a series of films as part of the new AAG Shorts initiative and student
film competition. It is aimed at presenting the latest research on the subject but also finding answers to the question of how we can develop the use of film in the discipline.
Papers are welcomed on the subject of how geographers can use film and write about film and
what are the possibilities and challenges of this media for the discipline as a whole.
They can include (but are not limited to) the use of films for teaching, research, academic publication and dissemination to a wider public.
