With clarity, panache, power, and urgency, Documentary Resistance forcefully and unconditionally intervenes into a discipline absorbed with the neoliberalism of auteurs and aesthetics. It unfurls a trenchant historical and political probe into documentary agency, collective identities, and social change across a wide range of documentary modes engaging labor, reproductive rights, and the racialization of police brutality. Compelling and field-redefining,
Aguayo argues that the political materialities and micro-practices of production cultures and media circulation across emerging technologies and platforms can open up spaces for empathy, community-building, and a documentary public commons. Documentary Resistance resolutely insists social movements confronting
injustice constitute the necessary starting point for documentary theories and practices.
Angela J. Aguayo is Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Culture at Southern Illinois University. She is scholar and media maker whose practice reflects an interdisciplinary approach to documentary, media studies, rhetoric, and critical cultural theory. Her most recent work is focused on agency, collective identification and participatory media cultures, investigating the possibilities for documentary to engage the process of social change. She is also an award
winning writer, director and producer of mutiple documentary shorts utilized in community engagement campaigns as well as screening at festivals and museums around the world.