EMBODYING THE VIDEO ESSAY: VIDEOGRAPHIC METHODS AND PRACTICES (2023)
In 2022, I was selected as a participant for the prestigious Scholarship in Sound and Image Workshop at Middlebury College (USA), one of only two scholars from Europe to be accepted onto the programme. After the workshop in July 2022, I formed a committee with several of my fellow Middlebury alumni - Joel Burges, Allison Cooper, Lucy Fife Donaldson, Colleen Laird and Dayna McLeod - and successfully bid for an SSHRC grant “Embodying the Video Essay: Advanced Methods in Videographic Theory Through Global Communities of Practice” (PI Dr Colleen Laird, for $46,000 CAD, totalling $77,000 CAD with matched funding).
In 2023, we built a team of thirty videographic practitioners across North America, Europe, the Middle East and East Asia, and launched a dedicated project website. From April – June 2023, we ran a series of Zoom workshops for our team with leading practitioners in the field, and in July 2023, we delivered a week–long, in–person, advanced videographic skills workshop at Bowdoin College (USA).
The in–person workshop focussed on performance–based embodied practices, led by media artist–scholar Dr Dayna McLeod. The workshop asked, how does the video essay frame, shape, and enhance positionality, relationality, and intersectionality? How do embodied practices inform our screen-based scholarship? How do we connect to each other in the videographic criticism community?
The network, workshop and subsequent work that emerges from the project introduces new questions of approaches to the field which has, to date, paid little attention to the relationship between positionality, relationality and intersectionality.