Behaving badly in the archive: A videographic discussion

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5209/tekn.104359
Keywords: embodiment, video essays, feminism, ethics

Abstract

Our roundtable emerged from a collaborative video essay ‘Kiss off’, created for Ian Garwood’s Indy vinyl for the masses project. ‘Kiss off’ explores the subject of archives with the question: what does it mean to behave badly in the archive? (See the Video Essays section in this issue of Teknokultura). The roundtable expands this inquiry, with the participants each reflecting on their video segment and engaging questions of institutional power of archives; accessibility; acts of erasure; our implication in, and resistance to, systems of oppression; and archival materiality in digital research. Over three months, we reflected on making the piece and the consequent questions that arose. Echoing the relay aspect of the video’s creation, each meeting addressed one participant’s segment in the order of contributions, with sessions spaced akin to the progress of the piece between makers, and each participant leading discussions in turn. This roundtable represents our discursive labour.

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Grupo de Investigación Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales. Cibersomosaguas

Author Biographies

Lucy Fife Donaldson, University of St Andrews

Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews. She is the author of Texture in film (Palgrave, 2014), the co-editor of Television performance (Red Globe Press, 2019) and an editor of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism. She was one of the co-organisers of "Embodying the Video Essay” workshop, hosted at Bowdoin College in 2023. Her award-winning audiovisual work has been featured in the Sight & Sound Best of Video Essays of 2022, 2023, and 2024, and screened at international festivals.

 
Colleen Laird, University of British Columbia

Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC, Vancouver, Canada). Her primary research focus is on Japanese women directors and the industry relationships between women directors, female-identifying spectators, and the contemporary Japanese film market. She has published in the peer-reviewed journals [in]Transition, Tecmerin, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Feminist Media Studies, Frames Cinema Journal, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, and Jump Cut. She was the PI of the SSHRC grant for the “Embodying the Video Essay” (2023) and “Reframing the Argument” (2025) videographic workshops, is Co-PI for the “Ways of Undoing” AHRC-funded videographic project, co-organizer of the “Videographic Venice” workshops (2026-2028), and is co-founder of the “Ways of Doing” videographic collective. Her first monograph Sea Change: Japan’s New Wave of Female Film Directors is under contract with Rutgers University Press (forthcoming).

 
Dayna McLeod, Concordia University

Performance-based media artist and visiting Filmmaker at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2025). She actively engages queer and feminist approaches to research-creation through art and media. She joined Jason Mittell and Catherine Grant as an Instructor at Middlebury College for the 2024 and 2025 Scholarship in Sound & Image Workshop on Videographic Criticism. She is part of a collaborative videographic project Ways of Doing, which fosters an ethical praxis of audiovisual research. Her video work has been featured in FilmExplorer, Recycled Screenings, and in the Sight & Sound Best of Video Essays for 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Her video essays have been published in [in] Transition, ASAP/Review, Teknokultura: Journal of Digital Culture and Social Movements, Intermédialités: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, and Exertions, a Journal for the Society for the Anthropology of Work. www.daynarama.com

Viktoria Paranyuk, Pace University

Lecturer in the Department of Film and Screen Studies at Pace University, New York City. Her research focuses on gender; cinema’s engagement with history; environmental approaches to moving images; and theories of the senses. Her monograph Cinema of Sincerity: Soviet Films and Culture during the Thaw is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press in 2025. Viktoria’s research has been published in peer-reviewed journals Film History, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays, ASAP/Review, Slavic Review, and in edited collections, such as ReFocus: The Films of Larisa Shepitko.

Daniel Pope, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He teaches world cinemas, film genres, screenwriting, film criticism, the video essay, and podcasting. Pope’s research centers on haptic visuality, questions of diversity in film, and figural nonfiction. He has published work in Studies in East European Cinema and Searching for Sebald (2007). Pope co-organized the “Theory & Practice of the Video Essay” international conference in 2022 and served as Director of Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival (2021-2023).

 

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Published
2026-03-26
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How to Cite
Fife Donaldson L., Laird C., McLeod D., Paranyuk V. y Pope D. (2026). Behaving badly in the archive: A videographic discussion. Teknokultura. Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales, Avance en línea, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.5209/tekn.104359
Issue
Vol. Avance en línea
Section
Miscellany

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