Giulia Battaglia
PhD Candidate
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London

Media activisms and contemporary media practices of digital documentary filmmaking in India

My paper talks about contemporary practices of media activisms and documentary filmmaking in the digital era in India. It explores these practices through the interwoven relationship of production and circulation of documentary films. It highlights the contribution that the digital has brought to the long standing movement of Indian documentary filmmaking, as well as to the production and consumption of the genre. It looks at the actors of these contemporary media practices as independent cultural producers making contributions to the development of different ‘visualizations’ of the country and toward a possible enlargement of India's vibrant civil society. The challenge of my paper is to understand the explored media phenomenon not just within theories of ‘cultural producers’ (Bourdieu 1993; Kondo 1997; Marcus 1998; Mahon 2000 among others) and ‘cultural activism’ (Ginsburg 1997, 2002); but also within a broader long-standing debate about representation in the discipline of visual/media anthropology itself.