Ways of Undoing: Craft, Collaboration, and Videographic Practice

The innovations of videographic criticism have the potential to expand the field of digital humanities and to create new opportunities and structures for how research is made, published and accessed. At a critical moment when videographic scholarship is becoming an established practice within film, television and screen studies, how can we preserve and expand this innovative and radical potential to avoid recapitulating entrenched academic models and hierarchies? In answer to this central question, ‘Ways of Undoing’ turns to systems of knowledge and modes of making that have been overlooked and marginalised in filmic and academic environments. Filmmaking is one of many creative practices that have followed the hierarchical formation in which ‘art’ is understood as of greater value than ‘craft’ and whereby the achievements of the few (directors, actors, screenwriters) are privileged over the contributions of the many (such as costume, hair, make-up, and sound designers). The video essay has likewise been conceptualised as a singular intellectual and creative endeavour in which the scholar-maker has been prioritised over collaborative possibilities. And yet, it is the very form of the video essay itself, with its many layers of process and production, that presents the possibilities of collective research. In recognising that the videographic essay shares the medium of its subject - moving images and sounds - the proposed project is designed as an intervention in which the focus of videographic scholarship is redirected to methodologies that prioritise craft, community, and collaboration. Most pressingly, the project seeks to recognise the value of collaboration and practice-as-process in order to develop new forms and practices of research, posing the question: How can collaborative craft practices intervene in institutionalised hierarchies which govern both filmmaking and academia? The proposed project thus has two main aims: 1) to counter the widely established lack of recognition for the creativity and collaborative labour of design craft in cinema; and 2) to create sustainable models of research, community and circulation which prioritise methods emphasising process and embodied thinking, and which generate knowledge through collective action. In order to undo persistent hierarchical power structures prioritising art over craft that are prevalent in filmmaking and videographic criticism, ‘Ways of Undoing’ is designed to create ways to produce, circulate, and teach collective research that counters the devaluing of craft practices, recognising their significance as material and embodied ways of knowing. These pursuits will result in the following outputs: An open-access peer-reviewed videographic monograph, which invents aesthetic and conceptual strategies to embody the material practices that are its subject; Three week-long in-residence workshops which develop community practice and collaboration with local partners in Scotland, Canada and Japan, through practice-based methodologies drawing on material thinking and process-driven craft techniques and traditions; One peer-reviewed special issue of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies edited by participants under the mentorship of the project team; Nine videographic exercises published open-access online and translated into four languages (Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin, and Arabic) to encourage global use; Physical and online curations exhibiting work produced at the workshops, including a guaranteed curated screening at the Locarno Film Festival in 2028; Three episodes for The Video Essay Podcast.