Faculty Lana Lin to give a keynote address at the Poetics + Politics 4 Documentary Research Symposium at UC Santa Cruz
POETICS AND POLITICS 4: AGAINST STORY
UC SANTA CRUZ, May 16-19, 2019
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: KIRSTEN JOHNSON & LANA LIN
& FEATURING BEYOND STORY, A COMMUNITY-BASED MANIFESTO BY ALEXANDRA JUHASZ AND ALISA LEBOW
Poetics and Politics of Documentary is a practice-led research symposium exploring the interconnections between art and knowledge as they are expressed in documentary practices, broadly conceived.
The symposium represents an opportunity for media makers working within the broad sweep of documentary practice to critically reflect on our own work—to come together to think out loud about what it is that we do, how we do it, and why it matters. As was the case at previous conferences, our gathering also provides an invaluable context for documentary-based research that both troubles and reinvigorates the discrepant categories of scholarly “theory” and cultural “practice.” Documentary practices are material, time-based, embodied, relational, routinized, performative, specific, unstable, happening and happened. Practice is a doing. At its most utopian, practice is an act of resistance to the impulse in documentary for ontological determinism or positivist recognition—its reduction to craft, to now-ness, to the indexical, to the real, to a set of conventions or imperatives, or to a set of modes or iron-clad truisms. The symposium invites participants whose work frames, historicizes, or embodies questions about the various possible relations of thinking to making in documentary research.
For more information on the symposium and the speakers, please click here.