Gender Focus invites academics across disciplines in a wider discussion about animation in research with a focus on its function, application, and value for dissemination and as a research methodology itself.
Overview
Webinar Series on Animation in Development Practice
Date: Monday 29 November
Time: 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM (British Standard Time)
Zoom meeting ID: 867 5205 4124
Passcode: m78C62TI
Capturing research with animation
The popularity of animation as a choice for documentary has grown among filmmakers and researchers within the last two decades. Aspects of documentary filmmaking combined into animated films have proven to deal with complex, emotional, controversial, and graphic subject matters.
Media institutions like the BBC use animation to portray difficult and emotionally charged stories. Even documentaries on Netflix incorporate some aspects of animation to re-enact events, demonstrate a series of interrelated events, and/or, visualise data significant to the film.
Animation in research aligns with many of the aims of documentary filmmaking. It offers new opportunities to reflect on:
- the aesthetic effects of the medium and
- the way in which artistic and filmic choices provide new lenses which help to understand research narratives.
Animation, like its close relative, comic, has also grown in popularity in academia for projecting research findings to wider audiences. Comics are inclusive to a range of audiences with diverse literacies and language barriers.
Animating research in South Sudan
Professor Tamsin Bradley’s research findings on violence against women, gender, and artistic practices in South Sudan were portrayed in the film – Art and Gender in South Sudan.
The subject matter for this research was well-suited for animation as it not only dealt with complex issues but also poses strong dualities between positive and negative aspects and consequences.
The contrasts can be effectively portrayed in animation through stylistic and metaphorical choices. This enables audiences to understand the research findings and the wider implications of the findings on a more diverse, larger group of women and men without fixating on the experiences of a specific individual.
The issues and experiences of women inevitably become symbolic in animation. Therefore, the issues can be seen more clearly to be interconnected, emotive, poetic, and immersive.
Through creative, stylistic representation in animation, themes, ideas and conclusions reach new emotional and conceptual grounds that can deepen our engagement and investment in research.
Join us at the webinar
Gender Focus invites academics across disciplines in a wider discussion about animation in research with a focus on its function, application, and value for dissemination and as a research methodology itself.
We will look at award-winning documentary and research films and how research bodies have embraced and acknowledged this work for its reach and impact.
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