School of Social and Political Science

Description

Thursday, 12th of November

9:30-10:30am 

Roundtable on Filmmaking with Dr. Livnat Decleve, Erica Monde, Chitra Sangtani and Dr. Ann-Christin Zunz (chaired by Ellis Kokko)

Room 1.55 Edinburgh Futures Institute

10:30-11am 

Coffee and pastries

Room 1.55 Edinburgh Futures Institute

11-12:30pm 

Unspeakable Things: Poetic Film in War with Dr. Joshua McNamara

Room 1.55 Edinburgh Futures Institute

12:30-2pm 

Creating with Communities: Anthropology, Film, and Remembrance with Dr. Koji Lau-Ozawa (chaired by Dr. Grace H. Zhou)

Room 1.55 Edinburgh Futures Institute

2-3pm 

Lunch

5.31 CMB 

3-5pm 

The Creative Container with Robyn Thomas and Ellis Kokko

Room 3.52 Edinburgh Futures Institute

Friday, 13th of November

1-2:30pm 

“The Stage of Doubt” with George Finlay Ramsay (chaired by Professor Magnus Course)

Room 3.52 Edinburgh Futures Institute

Wednesday, 18th of November

3-6pm 

Screening of “The Alabama Solution” and virtual Q&A with co-director Charlotte Kaufman

Adam House Theatre

Event information

Roundtable on Filmmaking with Dr. Livnat Decleve, Erica Monde, Chitra Sangtani and Dr. Ann-Christin Zuntz (chaired by Ellis Kokko)

1.55 EFI, 9:30-10:30am Thursday, Nov 12th

Bios:

Livnat Konopny-Decleve is a British Academy International Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She is a political anthropologist researching the Jewish radical left and alternative political imagination in Israel/Palestine and beyond. Livnat received her PhD from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University (2022) and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2023). She is a former co-convenor of APeCS – Anthropology of Peace, Conflict, and Security, a network of EASA. In 2025, together with Adi Liraz and Na’ama Landau, Livnat produced the film ‘The Rose of Ioannina’, based on her research and funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Impact Acceleration Accounts (IAA). Her research has been published in journals including the Journal of Borderlands Studies, Israel Studies, Visual Studies, and Mafte'akh – Lexical Review of Political Thought.

Erica Monde is a filmmaker, anthropologist and artist from Northern California currently based in Scotland. Their work focuses on the relationships between the body and the environment, queer ecologies, human-animal relations, gender, medicine, ritual, and healing, and embodied methodologies. They hold an MFA in documentary directing from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, an MA in medical anthropology from the University of Heidelberg, Germany and a BA in world religions from California State University. They currently run IMPRINT Documentary Collective (@imprint.documentaries), an international, feminist film collective working on embodiment and the body in filmmaking, through which they regularly lecture, lead workshops on filmmaking, oversee short film productions, and conduct research on the role of the body and embodiment practices in documentary filmmaking. 

Chitra Sangtani is a PhD candidate in social anthropology and a visual practitioner working across film, writing, and sculpture. Her doctoral project examines the politics of fire and flammability in Delhi. In this research, she uses video as a tool for documentation, a mode of collaboration, and a reflexive practice through which to explore how visual regimes mediate and shape urban experience.

Dr Ann-Christin Zuntz is a lecturer in Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. Working at the intersections of economic, medical, and environmental anthropology, she studies the links between (forced) migration and global economies, particularly in the context of the Syrian conflict. Since 2015, she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with refugees and migrants in Jordan, Turkey, Tunisia, Bulgaria, the UK, and Uganda, often together with refugee-led organisations, and with funding from the AHRC, Royal Society of Edinburgh, and British Academy. Based on her 2022-2026 British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, she is currently finalising a monograph with the tentative title “Brokers and the infrastructures of Syrian displacement”, and a documentary on the history of Syrian textile traders in Manchester.

Unspeakable Things: Poetic Film in War (Joshua Mcnamara)

1.55 EFI, 11am-12:30pm Thursday, Nov 12th

This session will explore the ways that creative approaches to filmmaking can open new languages for exploring trauma and violence. What does it mean, at a physical level, for something to be 'unspeakable', and how can we use poetic visuality to draw out new kinds of expression and meaning. 

Bio: Joshua Mcnamara's work explores the relationships between visual art and human physiology. He has worked on documentary films and a feature film in East Africa. He has been lecturer in African film at SOAS, lecturer in film and cultural studies at the University of Melbourne. He has just finished delivering a two year masterclass series on 'The Art Impulse' to practising filmmakers at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow, exploring the physical and psychological drivers to motivate us to make art.

Creating with Communities: Anthropology , Film, and Remembrance (Koji Lau-Ozawa)

1.55 EFI, 12:30-2pm Thursday, Nov 12th

Film has long been used in anthropology, and several related disciplines, as a medium of understanding and communication. As many visual anthropologists note, it is not a neutral act nor simply one of objective recording. Rather multiple layers of decision making occur, and the process of recording along with the output produced has a range of impacts. In this event, anthropologist Koji Lau-Ozawa will discuss several films he produced with different communities and the different processes and considerations that form a core part of this work. Cactus Blossoms Revisited (https://www.cactusblossomspoetry.com) centers the descendants of poets confined at the Gila River Incarceration Camp during WWII. Kioku (https://www.tularefilm.com)follows a group of high school students as they work to build a memorial in their town to commemorate their county fairgrounds use as a forced assembly center. Most recently Lau-Ozawa is working on a project focusing on Okinawan Diaspora in Hawai’i.

Bio: Koji Lau-Ozawa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work focuses on the archaeology, memory, and history of Japanese Diaspora and its intersections with Indigenous lands. Lau-Ozawa earned his PhD at Stanford University, an MA at San Francisco State University and hi MA (Hons) from the University of Edinburgh.

The Creative Container (Robyn Thomas and Ellis Kokko)

3.52 EFI, 3-5pm Thursday, Nov 12th

The creative container is a dedicated space to work on your creative pursuits and research contributions. That might be a storyboard for a film, a narrative nonfiction piece, a poem, or any project that pushes the forms and boundaries of how research is traditionally conducted and communicated. Bring a project already in motion or an idea in its chrysalis stages. You will have time to share your goal for the session and your reflections at the end. We will have two work sessions with a short break in-between. This is a space for protected time to work on creative projects, and to connect with others experimenting with creative forms and research methods. 

Bios:

Robyn Thomas is a PhD student in anthropology who integrates ethnographic film in her research methods and contributions. Her short films have been screened in eight countries and she has published fiction and narrative non-fiction in magazines and literary journals.

Ellis (they/them) is a PhD researcher in Social Anthropology who works with creative methods such as filmmaking and poetry. Their research examines the politics of transgender ‘suffering’, and they are currently working on their first documentary film on trans comedians.

The Stage of Doubt pt. 2 (George Finlay Ramsay)

3.52 EFI, 1-2:30pm Friday, Nov 13th

'It is a flash from the stage of doubt to certainty

there is no more than a syllable between belief and unbelief

prize this precious moment dearly 

it is our life's only fruit' 

Omar Khayyam

Artist and overthinker George Finlay Ramsay presents a short talk on doubt: personal, spiritual and documentary, and traces ten years of its use as a method. This performative lecture takes in volcanoes, Andy Kaufman, Simone Weil and a mime bear. Did you miss part one? Come along to find out...

Bio: George Finlay Ramsay (b. Dundee, 1988) is an artist & filmmaker working between documentary and myth. Much of his work is iterative and spans years, this requires a kind of devotion and discipline that he entirely lacks in his daily life. His projects to date have included inventing a service to burn people’s regrets inside volcanoes; his own family enacting a medieval morality play as an examination of their ancestor cult; an interview with Mt. Stromboli; beavers rebuilding the world after a cataclysm; the role of a southern Italian flagellant procession in a family’s process of mourning and a sixteenth-century manor house falling asleep. He was shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2025 & the Margaret Tait Award in 2023. His work has been presented at PAF Olomouc (CZ), Barbican (UK), The Whitechapel Gallery (UK), Camden Arts Centre (UK), Rupert Residency (LT) and elsewhere.

Screening of “The Alabama Solution” and virtual Q&A with co-director Charlotte Kaufman

Adam House Theatre, 3-6pm Wednesday, Nov 18th

This is a community screening of the Oscar-nominated documentary film followed by a virtual discussion with the film’s co-director (who was an anthropology major as an undergrad).

In 2019, filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman (HBO’s The Jinx) visited an Alabama prison, where, off camera, incarcerated men whispered a message: terrible things are going on and being kept secret. This reveal sparked an immersive six-year investigation to discover the reality behind one of the nation’s deadliest prison systems. With unprecedented access and video shot on contraband cell phones, the directors learn of a suspicious and violent death, which wasn’t an isolated incident – and that the official version appears far from the truth. A shocking story of brutality, corruption, and a system in collapse, The Alabama Solution shines a light on the inmates fighting for their survival who, against all odds, embark on a powerful campaign of resistance.