The IHR Research Cluster on Race, Violence, Inequality, and the Anthropocene presents

Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record
A reading seminar with Dr. Gregg Mitman

We will read two chapters by Gregg Mitman and Faye Ginsburg from Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record, edited by Gregg Mitman and Kelley Wilder (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Documenting the World concerns the material and social life of photographs and film made in the scientific quest to document the world. Mitman’s chapter investigates the many lives of a 1926 Harvard expedition film shot in Liberia; Ginsburg’s chapter explores the repurposing of Nazi medical films by disability activists. Both chapters examine what can happen when colonial and totalitarian impulses to collect, classify, and control are repurposed by those whose ancestors were once the objects of that documentary gaze.

For the readings and more information, contact mfernan3@ucsc.edu