Visible Evidence XII will be held at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, August 21 to 25, 2005.Visible Evidence is a peripatetic international and interdisciplinary conference on the role of film, video and other media as witness and voice of social reality, which encompasses a wide range of cultural, political, social, historical, ethnographic and pedagogical questions and perspectives from fields such as film studies, communication studies, anthropology, architecture, art history, ethnic studies, queer studies, history, journalism, law, medicine, political science, sociology, urban studies and women’s studies. First held at Duke University in 1993, subsequent editions have been held at the University of Southern California, Harvard, Northwestern, San Francisco State, University of Wales (Cardiff), with most recent editions taking place in Utrecht (2000), Brisbane (2001), Marseilles (2002), and Bristol (December 2003). Returning to the Americas in 2005, the 2006 version is planned for Brazil. There is an associated series of books published by University of Minnesota Press: http://www.upress.umn.edu
Visible Evidence, in addition to its interdisciplinarity and intense collegial ambience among academics, students and practitioners, is notable for its “manageable” single-stream program, in which all panels are followed by all conference participants in a cumulative process of dialogue. For 2005, we are also planning two slots of concurrent workshops. The keynote speaker has been confirmed as Anand Patwardhan, veteran Indian documentarist (Mumbai) known for internationally recognized documentary epics from Waves of Revolution (1974) to Bombay our City (1985) to War and Peace (2002). An accompanying screening series will be organized by the local international documentary festival Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal. Visible Evidence XII is hosted by the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and the Department of Communciation Studies of Concordia University.
The conference website for Visible Evidence XII can be accessed here.