What does it mean to live through and beyond crises? Who decides when a crisis has ended, and how are such decisions made?
Working within an interdisciplinary team of researchers, collaborating across sectors and institutions, we have begun to tentatively think about these questions as the organising framework of After the End, a new, Wellcome-funded 8-year research project. The ambitions of this project are exploratory; we are seeking to interrogate different kinds of endings in a range of contexts including the aftermaths of diseases, environmental disasters and other public health emergencies such as drug resistance.
Our ambitions are also shaped by the ever-present, yet increasingly urgency of our ethical commitments to address the stark injustices health crises leave in their long wake. Three years after the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic, the need to attend to marginalised perspectives and move towards reparative structures of justice seem to us clearer than ever.
As a Principle Investigator and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on this project, we have had the opportunity to think about questions of endings in the novel and exciting context of cultural archives, through a new partnership with the British Film Institute (BFI). In this sense, our work together on this research project has been oriented towards beginnings as much as endings. Our ongoing collaboration with curators and wider teams at the BFI is the first of its kind; not only are we drawing on their considerable expertise to explore how endings are imagined in the documentary and feature films and television in the BFI’s archives, but we are also working out a means of bringing our two institutions together as co-producers of knowledge, bridging gaps between archival theory and practice (Fossati, 2009; Cherchi Usai et al., 2020).
Our partnership has explore two key thematic areas so far: the end of epidemics/pandemics and the kinds of endings connected with archives themselves. In the first approach we explored materials across different categories of media from the existing online and wider BFI archives specifically relating to public health emergencies - epidemics and pandemics. This collection was the basis for a comparative reading which attempted to bring these resources into conversation with popular film and TV beyond the archive, grounded in a literary/cultural studies approach which explores how health emergencies are collectively experienced, and how their management and conceptualisation are shaped by constructions of imperialism, quiet nationalism, racialisation and gender.
In the second approach, we engaged in a more conceptual examination of the limits or ‘endings’ of archives themselves, using the BFI archives as a case study. While the future of film archives has been significantly reshaped by the internet and the advent of the Information Age, we thought together with the BFI about how repository in an archive is often the beginning, rather than the conclusion of the cultural and social life of a media artefact. The gaps, silences and limits of an archive can be critically engaged to alternate creative and reparative ends (Hartman, 2008; Russell,
2018), even as the fragmentation and repurposing of historical material in archival filmmaking constitutes its own kind of death (Derrida, 1995).
These initial months of partnership have been a personal journey for us as researchers working at the meeting point of the humanities and social sciences. It has been fascinating and instructive to reflect on the methodological differences between sociology and literary studies respectively. We have challenged generalisations about our disciplines which suggest those of us in literary studies do not always reflect on our engagement with cultural texts as method, or that in sociology we are more methodologically led.
During this time, we have learned that it is fruitful to come into collaboration work with a set of provocations rather than a fixed agenda. The early stages of interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral partnership can prove disorienting as well as exciting, as we move away from familiar frameworks or research objects (such as the Text or critical concept). However, the tension between remaining methodologically open and honing in on particular schemas and themes has ultimately been productive. What has emerged most clearly is that collaboration takes and needs time – rather than a means to an end, we have begun to rethink it as the beginning of an iterative process.
Patricia Kingori, Professor of Global Health Ethics, The Nuffield Department of Population Health (NDPH), University of Oxford
Kelechi Anucha, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Global Health and Film, After the End Project
Works referenced
Cherchi Usai, P. et al. (2020) Film curatorship: archives, museums, and the digital marketplace. 2nd Edition. Wien: SYNEMA Gesellschaft für Film und Medien (FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, Volume 35).
Derrida, J. and Prenowitz, E. (1995) ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics, 25(2), p. 9.
Fossati, G. (2009) From grain to pixel: the archival life of film in transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Hartman, S. (2008) ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12(2), pp. 1–14.
Russell, C. (2018) Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and archival film practices. Durham: Duke University Press (A camera obscura book)
