Audiovisual Healing and Reparation: Recuperative Affect of Mediation

Audiovisual Healing and Reparation gathers a collection of scholarly and creative voices that explore how audiovisual media can serve as a catalyst for healing, reparation, resilience, care and hope.

The contributors critically engage with the audiovisual mediations of harsh histories and experiences of violence, discrimination, racism, sexism, colonialism, displacement, illness and death, all situated within diverse historical, geographical, social, and political contexts. Through a reparative approach to films, documentaries, digital and social media, and art, they examine how audiovisuality intervenes in and transforms trauma, rupture, loss and silence. This book examines audiovisual media as a rich aesthetic, social and political site for acknowledging wounds, seeking healing, and reparatively reimagining a broken world during troubling times. It argues for the recuperative affect of audiovisuality, which can unlock silenced or suppressed (personal) histories by integrating them into the fabric of mundane daily life. It analyses two major questions: What kind of recuperative potentials can emerge from audiovisual mediations of troubling times? How can we (re)imagine audiovisual mediums, narratives, aesthetics, and practices as reparative possibilities?

This book will be of interest to scholars working in film and media studies, cultural studies, memory studies, performance studies, and affect studies and will also inspire practitioners of audiovisual media.

Özgür Çiçek is a film scholar, researcher, and lecturer in the Media and Culture Department at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her research interests lie at the intersection of national and transnational cinemas, minor cinemas, audiovisual heritage and media memory studies, documentary film and archive studies, film philosophy and aesthetics. Her forthcoming monograph is provisionally titled Kurdish Cinema in Turkey: Imprisonment, Memory, and the Archive.

Özlem Savaş is a media studies scholar, researcher and lecturer at the Department of Comparative Cultural and Social Anthropology at European University Viadrina, Germany. Her interdisciplinary work bridges media studies, migration studies and cultural studies, with a particular emphasis on affect and emotions, aesthetic and cultural production, and everyday life. Her forthcoming monograph, The Sigh of Displacement: Affective Practices of Mediating Migration and Belonging, is under contract with Routledge.