Cinema-going trajectories in the digital age

The activity of cinema-going constantly evolves and gradually integrates the use of digital data and platforms to become more engaging for the audiences. Combining methods from the fields of Human Computer Interaction and Film Studies, we conducted two workshops seeking to understand cinema audiences’ digital practices and explore how the contemporary cinema-going experience is shaped in the digital age. Our findings suggest that going to the movies constitutes a trajectory during which cinemagoers interact with multiple digital platforms. At the same time, depending on their choices, they construct unique digital identities that represent a set of online behaviours and rituals that cinemagoers adopt before, while and after cinema-going. To inform the design of new, engaging cinemagoing experiences, this research establishes a preliminary map of contemporary cinema-going including digital data and platforms. We then discuss how audiences perceive the potential improvement of the experience and how that would lead to the construction of digital identities

Cinemaethnographic specta(c)torship: discursive readings of what we choose to (dis)possess

This article examines critical methodological issues emerging from the interstices of applied educational research, social science research, and arts-based research, bringing criticality into the field of childhood. The author aims to question how she might w(rest)le (un)comfortably with "what is worth looking at" when studying children. Maneuvering between observations of children in classrooms and representations of children in film, the author will not only consider ways she enacts discrete performances of specta(c)torship but also how she might resist revoking one performance for another within her "practices of looking" by conjuring the menace of ambivalent narratives. Rather than falling into familiar framing devices that serve to embrace some, but prohibit other ways of seeing, she will procure notions of colonialism and restless hybridity to incite antagonistic play on the edges of ethnographic specta(c)torship, drawing on Stronach’s notion of "lean-to" concepts

And ... action? Gender, knowledge and inequalities in the UK screen industries

This article explores how a knowledge ecology framework can help us better understand the production of gender knowledge, especially in relation to improving gender equality. Drawing on Law et al. (2011), it analyses what knowledge of gender inequality is made visible and actionable in the case of the UK screen sector. We, firstly, show (1) that the gender knowledge production for the UK screen sector operated with reductionist understandings of gender and gender inequality, and presented gender inequality as something that needed evidencing rather than changing, and (2) that gender knowledge was circulated in two relatively distinct circuits, a policy- and practice-facing one focused on workforce statistics and a more heterogeneous and critical academic one. We then discuss which aspects of gender inequality in the UK screen industry remained invisible and thus less actionable. The article concludes with a critical appreciation of how the knowledge ecology framework might help better understand gender knowledge production, in relation to social change in the UK screen sector and beyond