Research Statement

Research Questions

The Force (2024) retrieves and revalues ‘subjugated knowledges’ of Scottish Gypsy Travellers (SGT) through critical archival interventions, place-based approaches, experimental filmmaking and literary practices (Foucault 1980 p.81). It contributes to urgent scholarly work addressing the cultural ramifications of colonial legacies which actively erase Indigenous and local knowledge systems, their cultural heritage, and collective identity. My family were SGT who avoided stigmatisation by keeping our genealogy secret and disavowing our ancestry. 

This video essay asks, ‘How to articulate the lie that has been imposed by the dominance and assumed superiority of our colonisers, by the power of racism and imperialism to diminish our culture and self-esteem in successive blows against generation after generation of our forebears?’ (Atkinson 2017 p.100).  

Context / Significance

My practice-led research specifically builds upon the Anarchival Practices of Carine Zaayman (2023) and Meera Atkinson’s Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma (2018) to develop a set of anarchival cinesonic practices to work poetically with the presence of absence as an aesthetic and affective encounter. Zaayman highlights how the omissions and gaps in colonial archives shape historical memory and argues for actively working with the missing elements to deepen understanding of the biases and power imbalances hidden behind what is recorded and what is left out. In addition, I follow Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s (2018) suggestion to ‘unlearn imperialism’ to decolonise historical memory and recognise and foreground the systems of power inherent as foundational to archival practices. They offer a way to preserve traces of absences in the historical record, especially as they pertain to material culture, thereby allowing dormant potentials in the materials to activate new lines of artistic and historical production. It is a working process that is informed by artist filmmakers who create multi-sourced “montage-thinking” assemblages, connecting audiovisual clips into resonant dialogue to evoke a visceral response (Arthur Jafa, John Akomfrah). The suggestion is that by interweaving heterogeneous aesthetic, temporal and technical elements such works enact a reckoning with epistemic violence, reconfiguring archive materials to draw audience attention to affective transmissions within the present (Pollock 2013). For Enrique Galván-Álvarez (2010) epistemic violence occurs when alternative ways of knowing are suppressed and marginalised through the imposition of dominant societal norms and narratives. This is relevant because the British and Scottish governments have spent many centuries trying to erase the alternative lifeways practiced by the SGT community (Tyson 2024, Hinch 2025).

In addition to the specific fields of practice above, I advance the propositions for the creation of new aesthetic imaginaries put forward in Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad’s Rethinking Art and Visual Culture: The Poetics of Opacity (2020), Justin Remes’ Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing (2020) and Jaimie Baron’s The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (2014). My research is situated at the intersection of several major theoretical contexts: the anarchival, para-semiosis, hauntology, and Indigenous studies (Zaayman 2023, Judy 2020, Gordon 2008, Robinson 2020). Intertwining queer, feminist, and anti-colonial standpoints that are further enriched with Black Radical and SGT poetic traditions enables me to practice and perform a kind of ‘ode to sharing’ (Moten & Harney 2022).

This video essay developed from out of my practice-led doctoral research. I use quotation marks here to indicate that fact. The research writes between and in dialogue with The Force (2024), my experimental feature-length film Grey Milk and Lost Kin (2025), my theoretical and personal thinking that emerged through the making process, and the artist filmmakers, theorists, and ancestors who have informed my decision-making throughout the research journey. I draw out the irreconcilable tensions within my own complex family history and its multiple layers, secrets and conundrums to register how it is implicated in larger historical processes, social formations and colonial logics. To contextualise this further, I interweave the complex state of relations into a digital timeline that acts as a temporal map. This interactive historical timeline builds upon Shamus McPhee’s Gypsy Traveller History in Scotland Timeline (2017), is accessible online, and provides a dated, chronological overview of major events related to my research. I include Andrew McCormick’s photographs of the Marshall family (my ancestors) and other diverse nomadic groups living in Galloway in 1905. It provides chronological and factual information, and additional explanation. The timeline shifts across time and space to surface the inextricable links between personal, political, social and geographical domains, to acknowledge their long-term sociopolitical and historical consequences and significance. The timeline is available to view here.

The alternative knowledge practises of diaspora communities foreground specific methods and activities for reconnecting relationality disrupted and displaced through colonialism. Contemporary Romani scholar Adrian March notes that by the time the Roma reach Scotland and England in the early modern period, they had suffered and survived persecution and enslavement by moving from the global South to the global North across the preceding centuries, and that their knowledges and cultures reflect and precede from those histories, conditions and diasporic movements (2023 online). To reflect this, I practise epistemological pluralism in my practice-led research to recognise, remember and value the tacit, animist, material and ecological elements that make up the SGT knowledge system. I want my research to embody and enact the social bonds, connectivity, interactivity and conviviality that makes up my ancestors’ adaptive life-ways. In this way, the ephemeral, mysterious, rhythmic, insubordinate, unconscious, non-rational, poetic and connective modes of SGT intelligence are honoured and illuminated. For example, one notable knowledge practise is their purposeful harnessing of ‘mimetic power’ as a liberatory poetic force (Lawtoo 2022 p.79). It is this embodied, relational, and sensory force, termed the Conyach, which my video touches upon. In the video, it is conceived as a liberatory poetic force that echoes and leaves traces within the body—be it magnetic tape, celluloid, flesh, air, earth, water—as an unconscious inheritance which transmits transgenerational relationships and impacts across space and time.

Methods 

Ballad singing and oral storytelling modalities are poetic forms of cultural expression and everyday survival practices developed by SGT communities in the face of violent racialised oppression, and cultural genocide and dispossession. James Porter and Herschel Gower describe how women were the main transmitters of ballads and folksongs in Scotland and whose contributions pass ‘more or less into anonymity’ (1995 p.73). It was a matrilineal knowledge system in which oral traditions transmitted wisdom, values and histories to the younger generations. These expressions are inherently polyrhythmic in nature and work to build trust, safety, endurance, social and environmental attunement, and wellbeing. R.A. Judy’s notion of ‘para-semiosis’ offers a useful lens to consider the embodied knowledge practises and repertoires of the SGT folks, with their diverse narrative genres, performance styles and gestures, speech plays, musical modalities, dialogic and nonverbal expressions that make up its ‘multi-channel view of oral transmission’ (Braid 2002 p.61). 

These include appositional expressions of resistance, group identity, and solidarity, in which meaning is co-created and communicated outside of conventional semiotic forms and linguistic structures. For Judy, such embodied practices offer powerful social critiques and create visual statements outside of spoken language. They convey complex histories, memories and emotions through modes such as rhythm, improvisation and bodily movement. In Scottish Traveller Tales: Lives Shaped through Stories, Donald Braid underscores narrative elements used by the SGT folks such as ‘metanarrative commentary’, ‘nonobjective coherence making’, unresolvable puzzling, worldview constructing and deconstructing, boundary-transgressing, fantasy and future world-building (2002 p.272). It is a creative dialogic exchange Braid contends, that involves the selecting, organising and transposition of poetic materials. Certainly, there is much sound and language repetition and imitation involved in SGT oral practices, and while some of these knowledge modes and storytelling genres are taxonomic, others do actively disrupt reason and resist cognitive understanding.

Along with storying the world, my SGT ancestors were documented as tinsmiths, tinklers, tinkers. The term “tinkler” originates from the sounds arising from their labour practices. Shortened to “tinker”, it refers to itinerant metalworkers and craftspeople who repaired and made household items. Over time, “tinker” became a derogatory nomenclature used against the SGT folk, and a term used for “disobedient” children. Tinkering is an example of a subjugated knowledge practice associated with hands-on experimentation, innovation, repair work and fixing things in an inventive and informal way. It refers to the act of making small adjustments, modifications or improvements to something, often in a trial-and-error manner. In my research, I reclaim tinkering as an ancestral knowledge practice that invites a generative, playful, insubordinate, improvisational approach to problem-solving and creative invention. This is specifically instantiated through the technologies that I harness throughout the making process. This method relies on freely playing or tinkering with materials using contemporary digital editing tools. Some of the sonic and visual editing processes I use in The Force include expanding and condensing time-based elements, adding looping, echoing, reverberation and glitching. One example of the presence of tinkering is through the repetition of sounds of tinsmiths at work—hammering, tapping and grinding—which heighten audience awareness of the video’s fabricated nature using heterogeneous and expressive montage techniques and technologies.

For Jihoon Kim (2022), contemporary media technologies and platforms offer marginalised communities new ways to explore their own histories and representation. Greater availability and more equitable access to technologies and institutional support have extended opportunities for diverse communities to record and control their own stories and histories. Indeed, the possibilities for direct engagement, which circumvents the distortions and power imbalance ingrained in traditional visual regimes and their entrenched gender, labour, material and apparatus hierarchies, become not just possible but urgently necessary. Conventional lens-based, screen-based, and archival practises with their often-unquestioned authority and biased representations, are challenged and dismantled. In this way, subjugated knowledges and minority discourses that demand a re-examination of how power and perspective are negotiated in the public sphere become possible (ibid. p.232).

I have worked with the vast institutional archives amassed in the School of Scottish Studies (SOSS) of the travelling peoples’ oral traditions, newly accessible online since the pandemic. My experimental method uses contemporary technologies to expand experimental analogue film traditions. I adopt montage strategies combining found footage and sound, contemporary digitally recorded audiovisual materials, textual montage, and narrative practices. This includes textual analysis, the production of audiovisual materials and recording at ancient campgrounds, with openness to happenstance, serendipity, and unforeseen encounters. I use textual accumulation as described by Katherine McKittrick (2021) that involves a creative repurposing and meandering between ‘miscellanea’ — objects/fragments of images, songs, stories, poetry, testimonies and places. In terms of copyright law, my video takes form through the categories of ‘pastiche’ and ‘quotation’ (Learning on Screen online). This means that I appropriate and creatively repurpose multiple ‘extracts of existing material’ (rephotographed book pages, found footage film clips, amateur home movies, travelogue footage, poetry excerpts, and sound archive snippets) to make a new pastiche artwork (ibid.). Pastiche and quotation fall under the exception of ‘“fair dealing” which are not defined in the statute but by courts on a case by case basis’ should a legal dispute arise (ibid.). Quotation must be accompanied by ‘sufficient acknowledgment’ (in my video, this occurs in the end credits or as onscreen text citations) and must not be ‘more than required for the specific purpose’ (ibid.). 

Pastiche ‘must not infringe on the original work’s commercial value’ (ibid.). It is important to note that authorial ownership of oral tradition is not individually claimed because the culture is understood to be mimetic therefore always re-created, shared and reciprocated. Moreover, as I listened to the SOSS archives, I witnessed the betrayal of trust that constitutes institutional knowledge production. These methods included ‘taking composer credits for other musicians’ performances’ and actively deceiving informants, to name just two (Clement 2015 online). This contemporary debate highlights the need for nuanced discussions about the intersection of music, culture and ethics, particularly in the archive collecting domain. This is explicitly addressed in my thesis and longer film Grey Milk & Lost Kin to underscore the violence foundational to individual ethnographic collections which extract communal living oral knowledges and cultural resources for the benefit of individual and institutional financial and scholarly gain. I resound sonic samples that amplify the violence hidden in the archive by drawing attention to the cultural theft of institutional scholarship which dispossessed the SGT folks through legal executions.

I initially planned to limit my sonic archival research to re-sounding the gaps, slippages, vocal hesitations, and stumblings, to draw out these sonic reverberations in order to dismantle, reassemble, and revalue them. I wanted to work with ‘a poetics of stutter’ (Dworkin in Perloff &. Dworkin 2009 p.178), to reconfigure ‘haunted’ sonic traces to reflect my own anxieties and aphasic struggles to articulate a hidden history of violence. I was orientated by the question, could I disorientate and defamiliarise sounds as acoustic registers of Scottish Gypsy Traveller insurrection and empowerment (Campt 2021)? However, whilst working towards this initial aim, I realised that an entirely “silent” response would mirror the state’s violent occlusion and my family’s elimination of their heritage. Moreover, such a response could also further increase the SGT folks’ isolation and compound the shame and erasure that live at the heart of British family secrecy (Cohen 2013). In Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain, Deborah Cohen writes: ‘Family secrets are sustained as much by talk as by silence and thus have left traces that if at points are stubbornly elusive are also instructive’ (ibid. p.6). 

Thus, a disavowed familial history acts as a living microcosm of the workings of the colonial racial, gendered and classed order and can be critically “read” to understand how external colonial structures and cultural imaginaries translate into intimate psychic and somatic experiences in the domestic domain (Kuhn 1995, Carby 2019, Hemmings 2022, Azoulay 2024). Extending Dionne Brand’s critical “salvage” reading practice to include Scotland’s nomadic peoples enables me to notice how fixed colonial tropes and narratives continue to shape Britain’s judicial outcomes and its social imaginary (Brand 2024). It reveals violences that are structural, lateral and epistemic and work to suppress alternative ways of knowing and living (Hinch 2025, Methot 2019, Galván-Álvarez 2010). For example, the recently published government report: The Report On Archival Research Conducted to Explore 20th Century Policies Affecting Gypsy Traveller Communities in Scotland, and the First Minister's public apology provide evidence of how multiple church and state-sanctioned initiatives were implemented to forcibly assimilate, discriminate against, and eliminate the SGT community entirely (Hinch 2025).

In the archive, I have been specifically practicing what Dylan Robinson terms ‘decolonial listening’ (2020 p.14). He proposes a listening attitude that is not “hungrily” listening for purposes of extraction but instead listens for kinship relationships between the human and nonhuman subjects/objects. To practice this kind of listening Robinson suggests being alert to the conditions of listening, of kinship, place, and time, emphasising that the listening be “deep” and engaged within a self-reflexive ethics of proximity, care and relation. I articulate the political demand of my work, as analogous to my own family’s lost heritage through assimilation and cultural dispossession. Whilst it is beyond the scope of my research to conduct an in-depth investigation of the specific institutional practices of the witness interview methods conducted by the SOSS fieldworkers, in my thesis I do consider and highlight how they ‘perpetuate hierarchies of knowledge and power rather than calling them into question’ (Shenker 2015 p.156). 

In the context of reframing testimony to include ‘global approaches’ (ibid. p.197) and connect them with other ‘post-genocide communities’ (ibid. p.195), Noah Shenker draws attention to the relational dynamics at play in the archived witness interview process. He argues that ‘the impromptu, off-the-record traces that highlight the shift in tone between pre-interview and interview interactions’ (ibid. p.162) are just as revealing as the ‘plain statement of facts’ (ibid. p.195). I have been careful to address the relational aspects and power implications of the interview process in The Force by re-sounding fragments of dialogues occurring between the SGT folks and the fieldworkers, to break “the fourth wall” of archival testimony interview production. This strategy subverts traditional storytelling conventions by drawing attention to the archive’s constructed nature and to my film’s inherent artifice.

Building upon the work of Jaimie Baron (2014), The Force seeks to connect to the subconscious mind of the audience through metonymic associations. The repurposing of unrelated, “unruly” and heterogeneous archival materials enables new relationships to the historical past to be articulated. Temporal disparity is fascinating Baron suggests, because of the double movement of the “then” and “now”, the similar but different. Jihoon Kim (2022) articulates this double movement as a kind of ‘expanded dispositif’ that redistributes and relocates knowledge, techniques and aesthetic elements.  Taking this further towards the unconscious and the domain of collective trauma, Jacques Rancière argues that cinematic montage and its intertwining of temporalities creates a kind of ‘extra-temporality’ (2022 p.79).  He writes that it is a process which foregrounds the irreparable and irreconcilable, and ‘bears witness to History – that is, in this instance, to what colonisation’ and forced assimilation have done to us (ibid. p.85).

Drawing on my familial history and my own personal creative archive using auto- decolonial modes is a tactic I have used here for positioning my work as both a historical testimony and a cultural memory work. Through the capacious materials employed, I articulate a forgotten history by performing ancestral memory practices using contemporary cinesonic techniques. In this way, I recover my ancestors’ previously silenced and hidden histories and recuperate SGT knowledge as forms of memory culture, reworking archival texts as ‘material carriers of memory’ (Rigney 2021 online). As Annette Kuhn (2002) has demonstrated in her conception of memory work, new memories can be produced through the reworking of family secrets as materials and thereby directly effect how we make sense of them. If we understand the domain of secrecy to be an absence of memory, then memory-production becomes a vital generative cultural process because it shifts our relationship in the present to the past.

Outcomes

SGT oral storyworking is an ancient sacred poetic practice in which the process of opening up to the insurgent force of story is a quotidian practice (Niles 1999, Williamson SA1976.208). Polyvocality and polysemy are relational modes which can be applied to communicate an affective force or esoteric experience of deeply embodied interconnection with the human and more-than-human world. Such an affective force gives the video essay its title and is conceived here as an interconnecting polyrhythmic communication system of corporeal presences activated through bodies and materialities using digital technologies.

Montage works to open into a plural consciousness, one that permeates throughout the SGT cosmology. Connecting disparate images, textures, figurations, colours and tonalities achieved through editing, refilming, blurring, layering, reversing, and flipping, forms different reiterations and other time-based qualities. Moreover, applying a non-linear montage method enables the reconfiguration clips to create different temporal patterns. For example, alternative temporalities and cosmologies can be foregrounded by bringing back decades-old scenes, both professional and amateur into the now. This extra-temporal process can be engaged sonically by repurposing fragments of archival voices from different sources.

The methods of digital waste and trace material gleaning may be used to amplify sensory perception to anarchival materialities and their transmission. Framing waste as a form of abundance offers the exciting possibility of practising refus(e)al as a generative, unruly force and creative tool. For example, the remediation of damaged and deteriorated 16mm and 8mm film footage visually registers the larger structural violence being perpetrated against the SGT community. This operates as state-sanctioned “stealth” practices of “slow” and epistemic violence that render some humans as waste, particularly marginalised groups with long histories of revolt against enclosure and extractivism.

Harmful stereotypes and other forms of epistemic violence may be refuted by working with the potential afterlives of ‘virtual readymades’ through the democratisation of access to digital archival materials (Foster 2015 p.42). According to Chuh (2019), the work of revivifying is one of the crucial counter hegemonic components of the politics of knowledge production. The notion of value can be subverted visually by deliberately selecting ‘poor’ images as defined by Hito Steyerl and repurposing different formats and qualities of digitised footage (2009 online). Embracing DIY and low-brow aesthetics—as representational modes feminists have used for decades to subvert subjectivity—through the use of readily accessible tools and materials, can as Steyerl suggests, transform the value of an image. Repurposing materials such as aged footage taken from the digital commons enables a ‘levelling’ of aesthetic hierarchy and revives digital copies perpetually in motion (Kim 2022). In this way, it may contribute to experimental poetic cinesonic practices by creating multi-sensory work underpinned by Indigenous, anti-colonial and feminist narrative and listening strategies (Robinson 2020).

Purposely “misreading” found footage can be mobilised as a device to gain access to popular memory and the past. Baron (2014) terms this ‘the archive effect’. The artist filmmakers Bill Morrison and Phil Solomon have successfully mobilised this effect, appropriating damaged film to construct an audience experience that both “presences” and “absences” counter-histories and counter-memories (ibid. 2014). The corrosion of a filmic surface over time that simultaneously hides and then reveals the photographic image is visually compelling and “performs” the disruption of memory and narrative that traumatic events have on human perception (De Bruyn 2014). In this way, aesthetic experiences which are rich in nothingness amplify the aphoristic and contradictory nature of reality as everything and nothing at once. As Grønstad writes, ‘Images that are grainy, blurry, out-of-focus, fuzzy, or otherwise indistinct generally lower the information value of a given work, which again invites’ a poetic modality ‘informed by the spectral and the secret’ (2020 p.113. My emphasis).

A haunting atmosphere can be generated by building tension between curious everyday images and archival voices. Modalities of memory and history are made visible as they occur in the archive by repurposing vocal enunciations and their ‘extraverbal utterances’ of forgetting and uncertainty (McKean 2016 p.23). This creates a cinesonic experience that is both fantastic and prosaic in its forms, thereby bringing together key elements of SGT poetics and spatial imaginaries. In this way, cinesonic practices demonstrate the ability of anarchival materialities to stage memory and amnesia.

A new perspective of landscape can be evoked to suggest ancestral presence as archaeological memory sites pulling up things, rising to the surface from the unconscious mind, from the underworld. Cinesonic technologies function as witness to what lies hidden and dormant (Pinchevski 2018). Looping structures and visual and colour transitions suggest layers of sediment and deep time imaginaries. Through such modalities, the immense social, geographic and epistemological service alternative cosmologies offer to the wider society and culture may be evoked. This manifests geographically, historically and cinesonically as ensembles of bodies inhabiting, disrupting and reordering the social relations, the land and river use, and the coastline of Galloway and beyond (Ahmed 2006).

Impact

My practice-led research seeks to contribute to experimental sonic and cinematic techniques and methodologies, whilst generating critical pathways to make accessible subjugated SGT knowledge and pluralise knowledge systems more widely. It attempts to draw attention to the enduring presence and non-normative, poetic and fugitive existence of the SGT folks, undoing anti-Gypsy Traveller logics by making transtexual and transversal links across distance, time and space. In this way, my research may advance a decolonial insurgent poetics that makes contact with the unconscious and hidden realms of SGT cultural oppression.” (Stone, 2021-2025).

The Force won the Video Essay Award at the Learning on Screen Awards 2024.

It was screened at Words and Worlds Symposium 2024, Royal Holloway, University of London, at UAL Doctoral School opening May 2024, and at Survivorhood, Traumascapes Arts Festival 2025.

I have exhibited this project in different forms (short film, archival photography, interactive media, multi-channel screens and sound works) in two group shows: Unfolding Narratives 2 (2023) and Unfolding Narratives 3 (2024) at LCC. 

My feature-length artist film Grey Milk & Lost Kin (2025, 01:24:50) was screened at The Garden Cinema in London in July 2025.

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Zaayman C. (2023) Anarchival Practices: The Clanwilliam Arts Project as Re-imagining Custodianship of the Past. Berlin, ICI Berlin Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.37050/wpc- ca- 01. (Accessed 06/02/24)

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows

Review 1: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.

This is a powerful and moving piece of work addressing the cultural ramifications of colonial legacies and their ongoing impact upon Indigenous communities. In particular, I enjoyed the vivid soundscape of the film, and the textural quality of the imagery, with its assemblage of damaged and deteriorated filmstock, echoing themes of cultural erasure and the fragility of historical narratives. The archival work is particularly strong, in retrieving oral storytelling traditions and offering the viewer a glimpse into a rarely documented past.  

My main suggestion is that while the complex theoretical work is done well, some of the basic concepts are harder to follow. For example, the work aims to retrieve and revalue the ‘subjugated knowledges’ of Scottish Gypsy Travellers, but does not explain what these knowledges are or how they have been subjugated. The author draws a connection between the archives and her own family history, but does not explain how she perceives this connection. Most critically, by not giving attribution or context to the archival material, the voices that we hear remain disconnected from their sources, giving them a spectral quality rather than an embodied status. While this achieves the goal of performing ‘the disruption of memory and narrative’, it is less successful in ‘generating critical pathways to make accessible subjugated SGT knowledge’ – are these two aims compatible, or at times, in opposition to one another? I’d be interested to hear the author’s reflections on any tensions in balancing their ambitions for the project, and the limitations imposed by the ways the archive has been captured or preserved.  

Intriguing phrases are used, but are not always properly unpacked. What does the author mean, for example, by ‘the presence of absence’ or ‘epistemic violence’? The author describes irreconcilable tensions within my own complex family history’, and how these lived experiences are linked to ‘larger historical processes’, but doesn’t clarify what they mean by this. Sometimes, research is cited in passing without fully summarising its claims or its connection to the author’s own work, making the arguments less accessible and harder to follow.  

This is not always the case. For example, the section on ‘decolonial listening’ is well connected to the film itself, and offers a mode of engagement for how the viewer might interact with the film.  

Overall, this is a thought-provoking and visually-arresting video essay, making novel use of archival materials, and finding inventive ways to explore the relationship of the past to the present. It is a powerful and resonant film, which offers an original and compelling means of examining cultural memory, and makes an important contribution in demonstrating the potential of practice-research.  

Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor changes of written statement

The Force successfully demonstrates how multilayered practice research can be, through the creative and rigorous experimentation of combination of a wide range of (re)sources to contribute to sensuous knowledge. Here, we are invited to reflect on the impact of colonialism in Scottish Gypsy Travellers, an identity the researcher identifies herself with.  

The act of filmmaking becomes an act of activism, through the restoration of damaged found footage, original footage, intertext, a caring and strategic carefully curated and framed game of lights, and various layers of meanings (the voice over, the background sound, and the music associated with the gypsy travelers).  

The researcher demonstrates awarenes of this process of acting and thinking through (film)making in the statement when it refers to “montage-thinking”, stressing indeed the affective dimension of the diverse range of signifiers. The reference to “decolonial thinking” seems particularly relevant to a research question that deals with the impact of colonialism. What is strong is thus not just the argument being conveyed, but its poetic and activist mode of expression, with a conscious form of experimentation. The statement offers a strong theoretical foundation that enhance the argument performed in the film, which feels like an audiovisual or multi-sensory poem, drawing on archives mainly based in Scotland.  

The Force is an impressive piece of experimental filmmaking and cultural memory work. It offers an immersive and moving experience that is both inspirational and educational. It is unsurprising that the work has already won an award. It should be screened in art galleries.

The written statement adds a strong and very interesting research base for this amazing work. The copyright aspects of the project are addressed but briefly, they should be expanded given the theme of the special dossier ‘Filmmaking and Copyright Law’. The author may want to add a few lines on how they interpret the concepts of ‘pastiche’ and ‘quotation’ in the context of their work. 

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response