Who We Are: Teaching Ethnography Through Collaborative Filmmaking

I will talk about the collaborative ethnographic filmmaking done as part of a master’s degree course in Intercultural Communication, the product of which is the film “Who We Are.” As the title suggests, the focus of the work is on the students’ reflection of their place in society and an expression of the elements that make up their identity. The students embarked on an auto-ethnography in visual form, the style and shape of their contributions left open to them – as a result widely differing, according to individual background and the issues that take the forefront in their lives, so resulting in a polyphony of perspectives.

The film “Who We Are” is a collaborative project in more than one way- it’s a collaboration between disciplines – sociology and anthropology - as well as a result of both students’ work and mine. To compare approaches, I will address a second collaborative project I have been a part of, an exercise in co-creative research and storytelling of pandemic moments by an international collective of anthropologists and artists (Visual Research Network), similarly intended to represent an evocative multiplicity of localities, perceptions, and sensibilities.