Places, cultures, and ways of knowing the world create one another. This academic conference concerns the ways in which films, series, and other audiovisual media and arts serve not only to represent place and home but also to imagine it, understand it, and produce it for the future.
All cultural productions are created out from particular positions, perspectives, and geographical bases. This is true for everything from blockbuster movies that aim for global audiences, to short films addressing localised issues and concerns, to videogames that place players in digital landscapes. The knowledge systems and epistemologies that organise sense of place and space are inescapable.
Organised by Island Dynamics in collaboration with UiT The Arctic University of Norway – Alta and the Center for Caribbean Studies at Hangzhou Normal University, this academic conference on ‘Knowing place through film’ asks how audiovisual media and arts interact with, are influenced by, and construct people (folk), place, and culture—including folklore, Indigenous knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge, and other ways of knowing that are commonly conceptualised as local or culturally specific.