Doing Feminism through Film: Public Engagement, Impact and a Journey in Research and Practice Seminar

Abstract

In 2016 I completed Growing Up Married , a 27 min documentary about forced marriage and child brides in Turkey, also my first exposure to filmmaking as a feminist Film Studies scholar. I made the film with a desire to give voice to women’s stories that were discursively silenced, and with the aim of drawing attention to the significance of activism in feminist film research. In this paper, while offering a post-hoc analysis of the dissemination practices I used in the post-production period of the film, and drawing on my experience of showing it to a range of audiences (from policymakers to international film festivals), I aim to demonstrate how public engagement can meaningfully function as a method of dissemination for and internationalising feminist research. It is through this feminist creative practice research that experiences of women in Turkey travelled to the UK and have informed policy debates around forced marriage. Indeed, the film’s journey to date shows how stories of women, in two countries with distinct cultural differences, can speak to each other. This paper visits discussions around the impact of feminist research and practice and recent debates around the concept of public engagement. While reviving debates around feminist theory and practice, I argue that public engagement can be fruitfully used in feminist film studies as a method of disseminating knowledge beyond academia.

Speaker

Eylem Atakav is Professor of Film, Gender and Public Engagement at the University of East Anglia where she teaches courses on women and film; women, Islam and media; and Middle Eastern media. She is the author of Women and Turkish Cinema: Gender Politics, Cultural Identity and Representation (2012) and editor of Directory of World Cinema: Turkey (Intellect, 2013). She is the director of Growing Up Married (2016) – an internationally acclaimed and award-winning documentary about forced marriage and child brides in Turkey.