Year: 2025-2026
Research Team Type: Faculty-led
Team leads: Natalia Brizuela, Professor, Departments of Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese, UC Berkeley; Naomi Etsehiywot, PhD Student, Department of African-American and African Diaspora Studies
This interdisciplinary research group investigates the use of filmmaking as a methodological and epistemological tool in the social sciences, proposing an expanded approach to the study of social phenomena. Firmly situated in the historical development of global capitalism and Western hegemony, film production has long been a medium for both reflecting and disrupting power and ideology, offering insights into economies of representation. By critically engaging with the aesthetic dimensions of filmmaking — such as composition, lighting, editing, and sound — this research team asks how visual representation constructs, destabilizes, and amplifies the ideological and relational dynamics embedded in traditional social science methods like ethnography and participant observation.
Drawing from feminist, Black, and postcolonial studies, and their critical insights into the power dynamics of representation, this group explores how film can interrogate the affective and sensory dimensions of questions around migration, humanitarianism, urban transformation, and racialized subjectivities. Through this lens, the team positions filmmaking as a methodology for interrogating the distribution of human value across populations, and a unique medium for relating to our objects of study and traditional social science techniques. This research not only contributes to evolving qualitative methodologies in the social sciences, but also advances the potential of visual media to (re)shape academic discourse and foster deeper understanding of global social issues.