in print with Manchester University Press, expected late 2024.
This compilation adds to a reflexive body of works on the sensory, inter-subjective, and narrative aspects of ethnographic filmmaking. It aims to bridge the divide between researchers’ personal journeys and their epistemological explorations of other lifeworlds. Following the publication of Filmmaking for Fieldwork: A Practical Handbook(Lawrence, 2020), Empirical Art: Filmmaking for Fieldwork in Practice addresses challenges and realisations that arise from introducing image and sound recording devices, audio-visual archives and editing tools to the research process as practices of relating and narrating. The multiplicity of approaches presented here calls for a re-imagination of the empirical, not as a reflection of reality, but as testaments to the art of crafting connections. In doing so, we hope to offer future practitioners meaningful avenues to approach ethnographic filmmaking and, in contemplating the questions and concerns raised here, deepen the findings of their camera-based research.
Introduction: Crafting connections by Martha-Cecilia Dietrich and Andy Lawrence
Part 1. Narrating Experience
1. Bearing: Documenting the self in early motherhood. Rosie Reed Hillman
2. The screen walk method: Exploring the social lifeworlds of digital environments. Steffen Köhn
3. Filming pasts, presents and futures: Bringing the archive to life and seeing the archive in life. Stephen A. Linstead
4. The aesthetics of access: Filmmaking in a Balinese ‘deaf village’. Erin Moriarty
Part 2. The Camera as a Catalyst
5. The magic of a floating stone: Ciné-play in poetic imaginaries of old age. Jón Bjarki Magnússon
6. The potentiality of form: Essayistic modes in making an ethnographic documentary. Anja Dreschke and Michaela Schäuble
7. Beyond the recording button: The role of the camera in post-war memory research. Martha-Cecilia Dietrich
Part 3. At the Edge of the Frame
8. My lustful eye: Filmmaking, ‘empirical excess’ and the limits of being in control of one’s art. Mattijs van de Port
9. Expanding the limits: Observational and VR filmmaking with women and children in prison. Rossella Schillaci
10. The productivity in failure: Filmmaking as transformative practice. Andy Lawrence
Part 4. Taking Position
11. Contesting invisibility: Stories of Indian migrant women in Japan. Megha Wadhwa
12. An international love affair at the Chinese-Russian border: A filmic event ethnography. Elena Barabantseva
13. Losing face: Complicating human subjectivity through multispecies character development. Annika Capelàn
14. The political ‘opponent’ in my lens. Christine Moderbacher
Epilogue: From experience to empirical art. David MacDougall
