AHRC funding success: 'Ways of Undoing: Craft, Collaboration and Videographic Practice'

Dr Lucy Fife Donaldson and her Co-Investigator Dr Colleen Laird (University of British Columbia) have been awarded a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Catalyst grant for their collaborative project 'Ways of Undoing: Craft, Collaboration and Videographic Practice.'

The three-year international initiative positions videographic criticism at the forefront of the digital humanities, exploring how videographic practice can resist and undo entrenched hierarchies that structure both filmmaking and academia, instead prioritizing systems of knowledge and modes of making grounded in craft, community, and collaboration. The project builds on the videographic collective 'Ways of Doing', founded by Drs Donaldson and Laird, with Professor Alison Peirse (University of Leeds) and video artist Dr Dayna McLeod, and the work they have been doing together to emphasise process, embodied thinking, and collective action. The new project will create further opportunities for research, exchange, and making that push videographic criticism into new territories.

Over the course of three years (2026-2028), Drs. Donaldson and Laird will organize and host three fully-funded summer workshops on videographic criticism in Scotland (St Andrews, 2026), Canada (UBC, 2027), and Japan (Meiji University, 2028), alongside public screenings, exhibitions, online resources, and open-access publications. One of these publications will be a videographic monograph produced by Dr Donaldson: Invisible Labour: The material Worlds of Film Designers (under contract with Lever Press as part of the Videographic Book Series developed by Professor Jason Mittell). The project will culminate with a special program at the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland) in 2028.  Project partners span Dundee Contemporary Arts, Meiji University (with Lindsay Nelson), Aoyama Gakuin University (with Chelsea Szendi Schieder), The Video Essay Podcast (with Will DiGravio), and the Locarno Film Festival (with Kevin B. Lee).