Professors Anjali Monteiro and Kizhavana Jayasankar, researchers cum film makers from the Centre of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Studies (TISS) in Mumbai, India, holds a seminar at Stockholm University on ”The Politics of Documentary Film as Research Practice”, on Monday 22 April 2013, 10–12. The seminar is organised by the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, in collaboration with the unversity’s Forum for Asian Studies. Venue: Room B600, Dept. of Social Anthropology, Frescati House B, sixth floor, Stockholm.
Monteiro Jayasankar have won thirty national and international awards for their films and have several publications in the area of media and cultural studies. They are currently at Lund University on an Erasmus Mundus fellowship.

Abstract: In contemporary documentary practice and ethnographic research, the relations of power between authors-researchers and their subjects are being re-negotiated in various ways. Film makers and researchers are exploring modes of opening out the spaces available to the voices of their subjects and reflexively questioning their own authorial presence. Any attempt to destabilise the position of the filmmaker-researcher as a purveyor of ‘other’ cultures has perhaps also to question the dominant idea of the image as evidence. This shift towards a more complex relation between signifiers of sound and image, begins to destabilize comfortable subject positions and demands that viewers actively engage with the film text, questioning its truth claims. Drawing on the authors’ work, this presentation, illustrated with documentary clips, critically reflects on the politics of representation in documentary film as research practice.