Ithaca College

Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies and Codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, delivered an invited lecture on October 19 for the Colgate University Semester in Philadelphia program.  

Her lecture was entitled “Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice.”

Based on her new book of the same title, the lecture argues for a theorization of collaborative participatory documentary practices that are place-based, migrate across different interfaces, and open up dialogues  and actions on political and historical traumas through postcolonial methodologies. 

The projects analyzed engage topics such as gentrification, labor, shorelines and climate change, food security, migrants in Canada, the Great Famine in China, the war in Syria, forced sterilization in Peru, disability, and the Rohingya crisis.

The lecture was delivered at Scribe Video, a media arts organization that is an internationally recognized leader in participatory, community-based media practice and is featured in Zimmermann’s forthcoming book.