Capturing the Imagination:
Independence and the Claim to Rights
Organized by Christiana Ochoa
REGINA AUSTIN
PARTICIPANT
Regina Austin is a William A. Schnader Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania. Her interests include the overlapping burdens of race, gender, and class oppression in traditional legal scholarship, as well as documentary films. She is the director of the Penn Program on Documentaries & the Law. In addition to making extensive use of documentaries in her traditional courses, Austin teaches a visual legal advocacy seminar in which the students make videos on behalf of actual public interest clients and causes that premiere at the annual Rough Cut Video Festival.
MARK GIBNEY
PARTICIPANT
Mark Gibney is the Belk Distinguished Professor
UNC Asheville. Since 1984, Gibney has directed the Political Terror Scale (PTS), which measures levels of physical integrity violations in more than 185 countries (www.politicalterrorscale.org). Professor Gibney is also one of the founding members of the Extraterritorial Obligations (ETO) Human Rights Consortium, which in November 2011 produced the Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations of States in the area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (www.etoconsortium.org). His webpage is devoted to reviewing and analyzing human rights film.
HUBERT SAUPER
FILMMAKER
Filmmaker Hubert Sauper gives conferences and master classes in film schools and universities all over the world. His socio-political and poetic films have been winning over 50 major international prizes, among them the awards at Venice Film Festival, Berlinale, Sundance, NY, the French, Austrian and European Academy Award, and an Oscar nomination for best documentary. His films include We Come As Friends (2011), Darwin's Nightmare (2004), Alone With Our Stories (2000), and Kisangani Diary (1998).
JOSHUA MALITSKY
Director, Center for Documentary Research and Practice
PARTICIPANT
Joshua Malitsky is an Associate Professor in Indiana University's Media School. He works on a range of topics related to documentary and other nonfiction media genres. He has published a number of articles on documentary history and theory including topics such as: nonfiction film and nation-building, the relationship between documentary and science, the conceptual intersections between both documentary studies and science studies and between documentary studies and linguistic anthropology, and on the sports documentary.
DAVID FRESKO
PARTICIPANT
David Fresko is the Andrew W. Mellon post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Documentary Research and Practice at Indiana University, Bloomington. He was Visiting Assistant Professor of Culture and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School in 2015-2016, and received his Ph.D. in Art & Art History from Stanford University in 2015. He is currently composing a book entitled "The Cinematic Movement," which examines the transnational itineraries of visual media and political film cultures between Western Europe, the United States, and the decolonizing world during the 1960s and 1970s.
CHRISTIANA OCHOA
Associate Director, Center for Documentary Research and Practice
Seminar Organizer
Christiana Ochoa is Professor of Law and Charles L. Whistler Faculty Fellow at Indiana University. Her scholarship focuses on the question of how economic activity intersects with human well-being. She has worked for a number of human rights and non-governmental organizations in Colombia, Brazil and Nicaragua. This work focused her attention on governance in the field of business and human rights. Her scholarship has been published widely, and her first documentary film, Otra Cosa No Hay/There is Nothing Else, was completed in 2014. She is working on a second documentary, which will focus on law as a set of tools for the realization of differing views of development.
RAY ARSENAULT
PARTICIPANT
Ray Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and Program Advisor of the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. A specialist in the political, social, and environmental history of the American South, he has also taught at the University of Minnesota, Brandeis University, and at the Universite d’Angers, in France. Since 1996 he has served as the co-editor of the University Press of Florida’s highly acclaimed “Florida History and Culture” book series.
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TANYA KARANASIOS
PARTICIPANT
Tanya Karanasios joined WITNESS as the Deputy Program Director after serving eight years as the Program Director of the Coalition for the International Court. In 1995, she worked to help establish the International Criminal Court (ICC) at Human Rights Watch and Parliamentarians for Global Action. Following the Diplomatic Conference that created the ICC treaty in Rome in 1998, Tanya served as a staff lawyer with the Human Rights Chamber in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She served as head of the Ombudsperson Unit in the Human Rights and Rule of Law Division of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Kosovo. Tanya also previously worked with the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on the protection of civilians in armed conflict at the UN Secretariat in New York.
ANGEL URRUTIA
PARTICIPANT
Mexican documentary filmmaker Angel Urrutia studies Philosophy and Sociology at ITESO, México. He graduated in Film Production from EICTV, Cuba and Documentary Filmmaking from E.N.S Louis Lumière, France. His professional experiences include research and production for Discovery Channel and BBC. He served as Producer for the documentary Flying Circus which was selected for the 30th Guadalajara International Filmfest. He was a 2015-2016 Collaborative Fellow at Union Docs.
TIMOTHY WATERS
PARTICIPANT
Timothy Waters' scholarly interests include the structure of the inter-state system, ethnic conflict, human rights, transitional justice, and comparative law, especially in European and Islamic contexts. His principal research involves re-defining self-determination to devise an effective right of peaceful secession. He has published extensively in leading journals of international law and international relations, including at Yale, Harvard, NYU, Virginia, and George Washington.
ALEXANDRA COTOFANA
PARTICIPANT
Alexandra Cotofana is a PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology, with research interests geographically focused on Romania and Ukraine. Topically, her interests include spirituality in socialist and post-socialist regimes, secondary economies, the anthropology of secrecy, gendered practices, medical anthropology, documentary-making and visual identities, and the anthropology of human rights. She explores changes in the relation of religion and magic within Romanian Christian Orthodoxy, with a strong focus on magic practices. Alexandra is Festival Director for the In Light Human Rights Documentary Film Festival.
CARA CADDOO
PARTICIPANT
Cara Caddoo is an historian of film, mass media, race, and African American history. Her first book, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life, is a history of early African American cinema from the 1890s to the 1930s. Her research interests include African American history, diaspora and race, film, media, and popular culture, built environment, and religion.
ALEX LICHTENSTEIN
PARTICIPANT
Alex Lichtenstein's work centers on the intersection of labor history and the struggle for racial justice in societies shaped by white supremacy, particularly the U.S. South (1865-1954) and 20th-century South Africa. His first book, Twice the Work of Free Labor examines the role of convict leasing and chain gangs in the remaking of the American South in the half century after the Civil War. He has written extensively about race relations in the labor movement, interracial agrarian radicalism, early civil rights struggles, and the impact of anticommunism on the labor and civil rights movements, in both the US and South Africa. His most recent book, Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid, is based on a photography exhibited he curated at IU and in South Africa .
