‘We express knowledge most of the time in writing, but knowledge can’t always be written and there’s so much we often miss. What if you’re working with sound or movement? Performance or experimentation?’ (from Towards a Filmic Humanities, in Science Museum Group Journal 10th Anniversary Edition)
In this part-day workshop, Dr Paul Craddock (Co-Founder, Common; Honorary Professor in the History of Surgery & Society, UCL) and Cal Murphy Barton (Co-Founder, Common) will explore the idea of film-making-as-research and make the case that film production should form part of an academic’s repertoire of research methods. They will discuss their own backgrounds in medical history and film production, respectively, and the ideas that underpin their collaborative approach to using film production as a research method.
They will talk about how their collaborative practice developed, how they engage with makers and performers of all kinds, and how they accommodate their contributions into a variety of outputs from peer-reviewed research to independent festival films. They will also discuss the idea of a filmmaker as collaborative researcher, engaging with archives and object collections, re-enactment methods, sensory ethnography and multimodality.
Craddock and Murphy Barton will engage with four of their film-led research projects – Making Sense of Medicine (Maastricht University), Fabric Bodies (UCL), Bradford Forwards and Backwards (Science Museum) and Dylan’s Dear Diaries (King’s College London Libraries and Archives, Special Collections).
Dr Paul Craddock has fifteen years’ experience making films for research-led institutions across science, medicine, humanities and the arts. His clients have included Nature, the Science Museum, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Oxford University, and Imperial College London. He’s also an award-winning writer and medical historian. Paul is Honorary Professor of the History of Surgery & Society at University College, London, and a Science Museum Group Senior Research Associate.
Cal Murphy Barton works in research-led and collections-based contexts. He’s devised and overseen film projects at numerous research institutes and archives, including the Science Museum, Imperial College, King’s College, UKDRI, the Alan Turing Institute and the War Graves Commission. His independent work has screened at international festivals. His working background is varied, taking in political consultancy, arts administration & cultural policy, and mental health law in the context of forensic psychiatry.
Lunch will be provided and registration is required.
This is a joint event with the HSMTE work in progress group.
