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Barbara Zecchi, director of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies, was invited to co-lead “Reframing the Argument: Videographic Criticism as Graduate Research Practice,” a graduate workshop hosted at the University of Notre Dame in June. Fully funded by a SSHRC Connection Grant from Canada, the workshop marked a new collaboration between the University of Notre Dame, the University of British Columbia and UMass Amherst.

Designed for 14 graduate students from the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Asia, the workshop explored videographic criticism as a methodology of scholarly research and knowledge production. Participants received training in advanced audiovisual rhetoric, video-editing techniques and methods for developing and presenting their dissertations through videographic approaches. 

Three UMass Amherst graduate students were among those selected to participate in the workshop: Eva Alvarez Vazquez, Spanish and Portuguese; Celia Sainz, languages, literatures and cultures; and Carol Pinzón, anthropology. Together with their peers and faculty mentors, they examined how to use videographic methodologies to convey complex research questions in innovative and accessible forms.

The participants’ final videographic works will be submitted for publication in Open Screens and [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, two of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the field.