10/23/12: Moving Images: Documenting the Lives of Women Migrants

Moving Images: Documenting the Lives of Women Migrants

with Janice Haaken
Tuesday, October 23, 2012, 6:30PM
James Room, 4th Floor Barnard Hall

Many contemporary feminist projects attempt to subvert the male gaze by “bearing witness” to female trauma through visual representation. Yet these projects have tended to be under-theorized. Since visual images invoke the spectator’s experience of unmediated access to the inner world of the subject, the evocative power of photographic images may readily reproduce forms of voyeurism. This under-theorizing becomes particularly problematic in projects that document the lives of migratory and marginalized women. Drawing on several decades of prior field research and documentary film projects, Professor Haaken presents a study carried out with women refugee and asylum-seekers in the UK. In discussing photographic images from the study, Haaken provides a framework for working through a series of ethical, political, and methodological dilemmas. She draws on psychoanalytic feminist theory, critical psychology, and participatory action research methods to argue for the importance of an approach to the visual that includes the dynamics of spectatorship as well as the dynamics of the research setting itself as an affectively rich and conflicted site of knowledge production.

Janice Haaken is Professor Emerita of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist in private practice, and documentary filmmaker.

http://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/moving-images-psychoanalytically-informed-methods-in-documenting-the-lives-of-women-migrants-and-asylum-seekers/