Honored to be part of this exciting new collection edited by Kathleen Ryan and David Staton!

Interactive documentary is still an emerging field that eludes concise definitions or boundaries. Grounded in practice-based research, this collection seeks to expand the sometimes exclusionary field, giving voice to scholars and practitioners working outside the margins.

Editors Kathleen M. Ryan and David Staton have curated a collection of chapters written by a global cohort of scholars to explore the ways that interactive documentary as a field of study reveals an even broader reach and definition of humanistic inquiry itself. The contributors included here highlight how emerging digital technologies, collaborative approaches to storytelling, and conceptualizations of practice as research facilitate a deeper engagement with the humanistic inquiry at the center of documentary storytelling, while at the same time providing agency and voice to groups typically excluded from positions of authority within documentary and practice-based research, as a whole. This collection represents a key contribution to the important, and vocal, debates within the field about how to avoid replicating colonial practices and privileging.

This is an important book for practice-based researchers as well as advanced-level media and communication students studying documentary media practices, interactive storytelling, immersive media technologies, and digital methodologies.

Part One: Potentials

1. Agency Through Co-Creation: Interactive Documentary as Decolonizing Practice, Kathleen M. Ryan and David Staton

2. Interactive Documentary: Its History and Future as a Polyphonic Form, Judith Aston and Stefano Odorico

3. Choose Your Own Generation: Interactive LGBTQ+ Narratives From South Asian Families, Aashish Kumar in conversation with Tammy Rae Matthews. Edited by Tammy Rae Matthews.

4. Documentary Impact: A Framework for Analyzing Engagement Strategies Used in i-docs, Carles Sora-Domenjó and Anandana Kapur　

Part Two: Collaborations

5. Democratizing Documentary and Interactive Social Media Practice, Gino Canella

6. An Outsider Approach to Cinematography: Native Representation, Breaking the Norms and Finding New Ways to Explore Indigenous Spaces, Malek Rasamny and Matt Peterson in conversation with Rania Al Namara. Edited by Rania Al Namara.

7. Reframing Creative Practice for Telling Factual Stories Of War And Trauma Through Oral History Interactive Documentary (OHID), Leonie Jones　

Part Three: Poetics

8. Interactive Multispecies Documentary Methods in Wretched Waters: The Slow Violence of the Rio Doce Disaster, Isabelle Carbonell

9. On Histories of Dispersal, the Missing Pictures and Ways of Knowing: The Artist’s Space Redefined for a Plural Art Practice, Alexandra Sophia Handal in conversation with Rania Al Namara. Edited by Rania Al Namara.

10. Decolonizing Transmedia Practices: An Essay on Editing, Anita Wen-Shin Chang　

Part Four: Technologies

11. Between Self and Other: Propositions for Non-Dualistic Research on VR, Eva Theunissen and Paolo S.H. Favero

12. Beyond Technology’s Promise: Building Trust, Owning Narrative, Self-Authorship, and the Power of Storytelling!, Joel Kachi Benson in conversation with Rania Al Namara. Edited by Rania Al Namara.

13. Desert Stars: Effectuation and Co-Creation in a Research-Creation i-doc, André Paz, Felipe Carrelli, Galileo Mobile and Amanar task forcePart Five: Expanding Boundaries

14. Guerrilla Archaeology and Ancient Aliens: Countering the Mediascapes of Stigmatized Knowledge, Jeb J. Card and Leighton C. Peterson

15. Responding to TensionTessa Ratuszynska in conversation with Tammy Rae Matthews. Edited by Tammy Rae Matthews.

16. In the Light of Memory, Diego Cerna Aragon

17. Expanding Boundaries, Indigenous and Migrant Cartographies: Counter-Mapping the Inter-National Relations of the Odeimin Runners Club, Debbie Ebanks Schlums, Adrian Kahgee, and Rebeka Tabobondung