Moving pictures: from ethnographic to autoethnographic documentary in the internationalization of the geography curriculum

Abstract

Documentary films have often taken a pivotal role in strategies to internationalize (geography) curricula and classrooms, being used as a method of bringing the world to the classroom. These documentaries overwhelmingly take ethnographic form. Problematically, the documentary gaze is characteristically that of an outside film crew and narrator mediating relationships between the “subjects” of the documentary and the ways they are heard and seen. Yet other forms of documentary also exist, including those offering autoethnographic perspectives to viewers. Autoethnographic documentaries offer a highly promising resource for internationalization of the geography curriculum, providing careful, analytic, theoretically-informed understandings of documentarians’ own worlds – which may be in the next neighbourhood or on the other side of the planet. This paper reviews documentaries as curriculum-internationalizing learning-and-teaching resources before going on to examine the flaws of “traditional” ethnographic documentary in this endeavour. It makes the case for greater – though not necessarily exclusive – use of autoethnographic films in our work to educate global citizens and provides some preliminary resources for locating and evaluating this form of film. As such it contributes not only to critical pedagogy surrounding internationalization of the geography curriculum but also to filmic geography.

Keywords:

• Documentary
• film
• video
• autoethnography
• internationalization
• filmic geography

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Freya Higgins Desboilles and Dallas Rogers for their suggestions of autoethnographic works supportive of curriculum internationalization and Bev Clarke, Julie Cupples, and Ruth Healey for their comprehensive and extraordinarily helpful remarks on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. The production of film is also used as a pedagogical aid and research tool (see, for example, Anderson, 2013a, 2013b; Garrett, 2010; Mavroudi & Jöns, 2011).

2. Warf (2015, p. 37) usefully defines cosmopolitanism as “an ethical, moral, and political worldview in which each person is obligated to humanity as a whole. Cosmopolitans insist upon the inherent worthiness of individuals irrespective of their country of birth …”

3. Carr (2008) offers an interesting, readable essay on some of the cognitive effects of the “Net”.

4. Although as Jacobs (2013, p. 716) notes, “very few anthropological films can be regarded as fully ethnographic because the majority of makers do not reveal their methods and are primarily concerned with satisfying the conventions of documentary film”. Moreover, with the accessibility of video production and dissemination technologies such as YouTube, more autobiographical materials are becoming available for classroom use.

5. Participatory video also emerged at about the same time (see Kindon, 2003, p. 143), if not earlier (Walsh, 2014, p. 2). According to Mistry and Berardi (2013, p. 110) “Participatory video (PV) is a process involving a group or community in shaping and creating their own films according to their own sense of what is important and how they want to be represented”. Once characterized as film in which “the filmmaker serves as a midwife for community expression” (Schugerensky, cited in Shaw, 2014, p. 3. Emphasis in original), it has more in common with autobiography than it does with autoethnography. Despite its efficacy, and as it has matured as a research approach, PV is now subject to a series of troubling, yet constructive, critiques (see, for elaboration, Kindon, 2015; Shaw, 2014; Walsh, 2014; Wynne-Jones, North, & Routledge, 2015).

6. Of course, sensitivity to local “Others” and their perspectives is vital to successful contemporary internationalization.

7. Some examples include: the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology Manchester, Freie Universität Berlin’s M.A. Program in Visual and Media Anthropology, UCL’s MA module on Practical Ethnographic Filmmaking, and Australian National University’s Masters of Liberal Arts (Visual Culture Research).