FAMS Speaker Series - 'How Documentaries Listen'

Please join us for the second event in the fall Film and Media Studies speaker series.

 Documentary scholars frequently refer to a particular film’s social perspective as its “voice.” As makers and viewers of documentary, we too colloquially describe the way films give voice to various social subjects (“an indigenous voice,” “A Black, queer voice,” etc.) This talk will shift focus, asking how documentary forms teach not only how to speak but how to listen and what to listen for. Rangan brings an intersectional ear to this question. Drawing on previous work on “giving voice to the voiceless” in participatory documentary and new research on auditory culture, her talk places documentary depictions of autistic protagonists and offshore call center agents in conversation. The resonances among these representations enable us to listen for the way documentary voices shape auditory norms of race, gender, bodily ability, and other social constructed sonic identities.

 Pooja Rangan is Assistant Professor of English in Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. She is the author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke UP 2017), a book that examines the humanitarian ethic of “giving a voice to the voiceless” in contemporary participatory media interventions that involve handing over the camera to disenfranchised subjects including at-risk children, disaster victims, autistic people, and endangered animals. Rangan’s current research focuses on the politics and aesthetics of listening in documentary. She has published on topics such as postcoloniality and racism, feminist experimental cinema, and documentary humanitarianism in a variety of academic journals and anthologies. Rangan also serves as President of the Board of Trustees for the Flaherty, a leading nonprofit organization devoted to documentary and independent film and video.