The RAI FILM FESTIVAL 2023 is hosting an online academic conference, 6-10 March 2023. Paper presentations will be delivered live and will be followed by a Q&A with the public.
As always we welcome panel, roundtable and workshop proposals from academics and practitioners in anthropology and adjacent disciplines. For this edition we are also specifically inviting participants to consider:
Visual anthropology and speculative futures
We find ourselves in a moment in which it is difficult to imagine what the future holds. The war, the intensification of climate change and the pandemic have brought questions about the future in sharp relief for everyone. Of course, for those at the sharp end of history, the future has always been uncertain and an open challenge. In this increasingly uncertain present, questions about the place, temporality and role of visual/sensory/multimodal anthropology feel more pressing than ever. If, as Stuart Hall says, history is always unfinished business, then the future is always multiple and open to many possibilities. What is our part in revisiting histories and shaping possible futures?
These are not new questions, and visual/sensory/multimodal anthropologists have been productively working with collaborative and multimodal modes, questioning authority and authorship, and creating an anthropology that engages multiple publics and is world-making. Afro- Indo- and Indigenous Futurisms, along with other related artistic and literary genres, have long engaged questions of temporality and futurity. These have been significant in shaping contemporary visual anthropologists’ practices and approaches and opened the future as something to be investigated, not as a remote possibility, but as an active agent in the production of now.
