Affective filmmaking

: an emergent participatory method of inquiry into how gender matters for young people in secondary schooling

Abstract

This thesis develops affective filmmaking as a new approach to doing research with young people on gender in secondary schooling. Gender in education is a contested domain in Australia, with schools a critical site in dynamic material-discursive relational practices of young people’s gendered subjectivities. Therefore, understanding how gender is experienced and matters for young people is critical to inform education policy and practice. Recognising that young people’s gendered subjectivities are in continual flux, with affect the engine of change, this thesis explores how filmmaking that centres affective processes can be mobilised as a methodology with young people to explore how gender matters in secondary schooling. The research began with a hunch informed by my professional filmmaking practice. If cinema’s capacity to affect through moving image and sound could be mobilised as a research methodology, it could afford a different way of understanding how gender matters for young people with the potential to activate change. Taking inspiration from phEmaterialism, to conceptualise and design the affective filmmaking method I think with agential realism and critical affirmative posthumanism in relation with process philosophy informed and speculative arts-practice, theories of affect, affective cinema and making-thinking experiments. This approach moves away from language-based storytelling to activate processes of making-with affective-material-discursive forces in school spaces in intra-action with the sensory-material force of cinematic techniques. With this theory-practice framework, I designed workshop activities as a provocation for student-led filmmaking as emergent affective events. I trialled a reduced version of the affective filmmaking method in online workshops with small groups of recent school leavers during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. The students made with feelings and matterings of gender that stuck with them from secondary school using pre-existing footage and a free online editing platform. The process helped me to refine the affective filmmaking design for the in-person workshops with senior secondary students the following year. Four (4) year 11 and 12 students at two senior colleges took part in the filmmaking workshops in intensive two-and-a-half-day blocks. The method’s propositions for emergent making position student filmmakers as agentic and establish a practice of response-ability that values unthought and unspoken processes of bodily relational knowing in the act of making.

Date of Thesis submission	2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Susanne Gannon (Supervisor) & Kerry Robinson (Supervisor)