About Doc Research

This is a course about doing documentary work.  This semester, our documentary work will focus on one theme: a sense of place.  You will become documentarians, researchers, recorders, producers and makers of true stories about place and its opposite, placelessness.

Doing documentary work is more than “recording facts.” It is a reflexive process in which we confront what renowned scholar Robert Coles calls the “moral underpinnings of social inquiry” (Coles, 1997, p. 6).  Documentarians–whether writers, filmmakers, photographers, artists–face the challenge not only of learning about the experiences of fellow human beings, but also finding ways to render those lives (in images, words, sounds, fragments, traces) so that others will connect with their stories, care about their stories, and perhaps even be moved to action.

The course provides an overview of documentary practices, traditions, landmark projects and emerging ideas in documentary.  Our focus is primarily American social documentary, with an emphasis on the ethical dimensions of representing “the real.”  How do we know what we know? How can we really know about and understand the lives of people different from ourselves? And how can we best represent what we have learned so that others may also broaden their understanding? These are the questions we will grapple with as you research, plan, and produce your short documentaries.

Our focus is on the American tradition of social documentary, stories that bring to public attention experiences that otherwise would not be heard in the corporate media environment.  As we look at examples, we’ll consider the possibilities of documentary media to raise awareness, the role of documentaries in community life, and consider the differences between documentary and other forms of media (including journalism and public relations).  We will also consider the increasing significance of digital technologies in doing and distributing documentary work.

This course builds on the critical habits developed in Media and Society, where you learned to look at the storytelling and selling institutions and systems of global mass media and culture critically and systematically.  In this course, you gain a deeper understanding of how media is made and the implicit and explicit ethical choices that shape media production.  Thus, as it explores the link between critical media analysis and ethical media practice, this course builds the foundation for further coursework in the major. Please see this list of specific course objectives, aligned with the Media and Communication major.

The course is scheduled to meet 3 hours per week. Additional instructional activities include the doc research labsdigital media workshops, film screenings, lectures, field work, library instruction, and other relevant events that contribute to course learning objectives.