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Documentary Practices: Witnessing Our World

Overview

  • Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
  • Convenor: Dr Molly Flynn
  • Assessment: a 1000-word project proposal (10%), non-fiction creative project (50%) and 3000-word reflective essay (40%)

Module description

Documentary practices encompass a broad range of interdisciplinary methods that employ the creative arts to witness, record, document and represent both the past and the present in our increasingly mediatised world. In this module we introduce you to the critical discourse of documentary studies through both theoretical and practical study of non-fiction creative practices across disciplines. We provide you with key pathways into the study of non-fiction genres in theatre, film, media, creative writing, journalism and visual culture. Through a combination of practical workshops and seminar study, you will engage in important debates about ethics, truth, witnessing, representation and storytelling within documentary studies in an interdisciplinary context.

Following on from this module you will choose a pathway for your dissertation project which will grow out of one of the specialist disciplines listed above.

Indicative syllabus

  • Introduction to documentary studies
  • Testimony and the art of witnessing
  • Documentary and human rights
  • Documentary theatre and the pursuit of justice
  • Creative documentary and essay film
  • Documentary in the age of AI
  • The afterlives of photographic archives
  • Collective histories from the margins
  • True crime and the rise of documentary journalism

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will have:

  • developed a comprehensive understanding of the existing discourse within interdisciplinary documentary studies
  • established a foundation in the critical debates about ethics, truth, witnessing, representation and storytelling within documentary studies
  • developed the practical skills to envision, plan and produce an original documentary project in one of several non-fiction forms such as film, theatre, creative writing, journalism, oral history and photography
  • gained the theoretical and practical skills necessary to develop a non-fiction creative project in the discipline of your choice.