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Njanji, A., 2023. Speaking back to the hostile environment: exploring refugee voice and developing representational agency through a refugee-centred documentary practice. PhD, Nottingham Trent University.
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Abstract
This practice-led PhD responds to what it perceives as the problematic silencing or ventriloquising of refugees’ voices across visual discourses, including within the ‘mainstream media’ and various modes of documentary cinema. Considering my positionality as a filmmaker, as a refugee, and as a scholar, I reflect on my own filmmaking as a vehicle to consider how refugee voices and images might be documented differently. I set out to create an alternative creative mode of documentary-making best described as ‘refugee-centred’ in nature, in which refugees are not only placed in positions of directorial control, but in which our agency, wellbeing and input is placed centre-stage, offering us various forms of literal and symbolic ‘voice’. This is achieved primarily through the creation of a 40-minute documentary film entitled Voices, in which I investigate the nature of refugee voicelessness through interviews with variously positioned subjects and explore how creative self-representation can be used to empower and platform the voices of people with lived refugee experience.
The 40-minute documentary film is accompanied by a 40000-word thesis, which explores the issue of refugee voice and visual representation from a number of important angles. It begins by establishing the necessity of the project due to the current status of ‘refugee voice’ within both the mainstream media, and the ‘humanitarian imagination’. Over the two subsequent chapters, it then shifts to exploring the politics of voice in various modes of documentary cinema and considers how the issues of directorial position and aesthetic prove pivotal to the construction of ‘voice’ within the documentary genre. Throughout, the thesis shows how these observations have informed the development of my own filmmaking practice. The overall objective has been to establish a mode of filmmaking that enables refugee voices to take the lead in shaping narratives about our own lives, providing an alternative narrative in which we are not depicted as victims nor as ‘voiceless’ agents. During the course of this PhD, I have ultimately therefore developed by own creative voice as a refugee filmmaker – and have also, I hope, enabled other refugees to have their creative voices heard.
| Item Type: | Thesis | ||||||||||||||||
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| Creators: | Njanji, A. | ||||||||||||||||
| Contributors: |
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| Date: | July 2023 | ||||||||||||||||
| Rights: | The copyright to this work is held by the author. You may copy up to 5% of this work for private study, or personal, non-commercial research. Any re-use of the information contained within this document should be fully referenced, quoting the author, title, university, degree level and pagination. Queries or requests for any other use, or if a more substantial copy is required, should be directed to the author. | ||||||||||||||||
| Divisions: | Schools > School of Arts and Humanities | ||||||||||||||||
| Record created by: | Laura Ward | ||||||||||||||||
| Date Added: | 15 Mar 2024 15:55 | ||||||||||||||||
| Last Modified: | 15 Mar 2024 15:55 | ||||||||||||||||
| URI: | https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/51093 |
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