Theater has been a focus of systematic investigation in anthropology since the 1970s. Because of its cross‐cultural nature, theater has been of interdisciplinary interest to scholars employing ethnographic methods to analyze cultural meanings present in texts and embodied in rituals and in the social exchange of symbols between performers and audiences. Following the “affective turn” of the 1990s and under the influence of postcolonial critique, performance scholars and social scientists have begun to look at theater practices as processes of meaning making, political negotiation, and collaboration. Acknowledging theater's immediacy in concentrating on what lies at the core of what specific societies want to communicate about themselves, anthropologists have also used performances to communicate their fieldwork data in the form of ethnodramas. More recently, social research that has wished to privilege reflexivity and intersubjectivity has engaged with the actual practice of theater making, to engage participants in active and ethical processes of knowledge production.
During the exhibition session, we propose to view a VR experimental documentary of 20’. The VR film is made after a three-year practice-based collaborative research on mothers and children living together in a condition of imprisonment. The objective is to understand their different points of view about the confined spaces they are - or have been living - and how they endured the challenges of raising children in prison, and also which are their hopes and dreams for the future. This Ph.D. research mixes theory and practice, with the intent to analyze the production of the VR film, made combining live-action shooting and animation Objectives and methodology: The aim is to discuss which are the potentialities and also limitations of immersive storytelling applied to visual anthropology in closed contexts such as prisons, with the collaboration of multiple approaches and forms of art, like animation. VR filmmaking process helped to research confinement - in confined places - during the pandemic. The objective is to understand their different points of view about the confined spaces where they have been living in the past, and how they endured the challenges and the crises they faced during their childhood and motherhood, worsened by the pandemic. The attempt to hear their own voices and their perspective following Mirzoeff’s ideas (Mirzoeff 2011, 2015) brought me and a group of artists and practitioners to experiment and employ different forms of art and methodologies, such as illustration, animation, digital storytelling, photo-elicitation and anthropological observational fieldwork. My hypothesis is that the VR filmmaking process – more than the normal ‘flat’ documentary cinema – helped to build and share a collaborative process (between academics, practitioners and the protagonists of the research). Furthermore, I (Rossella Schillaci) think VR technology helped to support the participation of children and youth, envisioning new possibilities for interdisciplinary collaborations and to better listening to children’s ideas of participation, and expression of their point of view about the present, past and mostly future, representing their thoughts, fears and dreams. Intended results: reflection and debate about ethical problems, the potentiality of using new technology in the research and also in the dissemination of the results. How new media can facilitate and open a broad discussion about the topics that involved not only academics but also practitioners and decision-makers? The VR film will be available for participants. An excerpt will be available for publication, together with a paper about the making process, the methodology, the challenges faced and the results obtained.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.