19–20 April 2027 | University of Waikato (In-person)
Proposals are invited for Expanded Documentary in Aotearoa, a two-day conference exploring the evolving forms, practices, and possibilities of documentary in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Drawing inspiration from Jihoon Kim's concept of documentary's "expanded field", the conference asks what documentary might be—or become—beyond conventional understandings of nonfiction cinema. We welcome scholarship and creative practice that explores documentary across film, installation, performance, sound, digital media, Indigenous storytelling, animation, archives, journalism, activism, and other hybrid or experimental forms.
The conference aims to bring together scholars, filmmakers, artists, and creative practitioners to rethink documentary as an expansive field of research and practice. We are especially interested in work that engages with Indigenous knowledge, decolonising approaches, emerging technologies, creative research, and new modes of documentary production, distribution, and reception.
We invite proposals for:
- Individual papers
- Three-person panels
- Creative and practice-based presentations, including film, installation, performance, and other media
The conference will feature a keynote address by WIFT NZ member Professor Anne Goldson ONZM.
DETAILS
Application Deadline: 25 September 2026
Conference dates: 19–20 April 2027
Location: Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts, University of Waikato
Please see below for all the details for Call for Proposals, including suggested themes and submission guidelines.
Please submit your abstract or creative proposal (including any space and AV requirements) to:
CALL FOR PROPOSAL
Conference Call for Proposals
Expanded Documentary in Aotearoa
Conference dates: 19 & 20 April 2027
In his 2022 book Documentary’s Expanded Fields, Jihoon Kim suggests that traditional documentary film has “expanded beyond the cinematic object” to encapsulate the many different (and often spatial) nonfiction experiments unfolding across today’s media ecology. Documentary, Kim argues, has become something of an “elusive artifact”, unmoored from its traditionally observational, social-realist cinematic history. This “expanded field” of documentary, as he calls it, might include i-docs, documentary artefacts, video installation, online shorts, essay films, home movie remixes, music videos, and mixed docu-fictional modes, amongst other forms.
The idea of an expanded field of documentary—or, more simply, expanded documentary— might play out in particularly generative ways in the specific context of Aotearoa New Zealand. Māori practices such as toi whakairo (carving) and tā moko (traditional tattoo), for example, may be understood as forms of embodied or material documentation, inscribing whakapapa, histories, identities, and relationships into physical and living surfaces. Such embodied documentation extends to live performance, via waiata (song), haka (dance), and karetao-puoro (carved musical instrument-puppets). These practices complicate traditional Western distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, instead foregrounding pūrākau (ancestral storytelling) and toi tuku iho (practices and processes of transmitting arts and knowledge across generations) (Waititi 2023, 2008; Te Kanawa 2022).
Aotearoa also has a rich history of artist moving image practices that draw upon a documentary vernacular, even as they circulate outside of traditional circuits of documentary production, distribution, or reception. Experimental artists such as Miriam Harris and Joel Kefali have created richly evocative animated documentaries that vitalise the material affordances of animation and sonic media, while exploring ancestral storytelling, migration, and memory. Artists such as Lisa Reihana, Alex Monteith, Fiona Amundson, and Dieneke Jansen, among others, create video-based and intermedia work that might be understood as ‘documentaries of-sorts’ (in Hamish Win’s words), exploring the dispositif of video installation and expanding documentary forms beyond the single-channel cinematic screen into gallery and exhibition contexts.
At the same time, there has been relatively little sustained scholarly attention to documentary in Aotearoa New Zealand in recent years. The last major book-length study, Russell Campbell’s Observations: Studies in New Zealand Documentary (2011), approaches documentary largely through a social-realist, observational framework, closely tied to questions of national identity formation within a settler-colonial context. As Campbell himself acknowledges, this account is necessarily partial and fragmented. His study excludes, for example, Peter Wells and Stewart Main’s The Newest City on the Globe (1985), due to its deliberate staging and self-conscious artificiality—qualities that challenge conventional assumptions about documentary truth and realism. As Kirsten Moana Thompson notes, “This is what troubles Campbell’s foundational study: a persistent conviction that documentary must mean one thing” (2013).
This conference takes up that challenge by asking: what might documentary be, or become, in Aotearoa New Zealand today? How might we rethink documentary beyond observational realism and questions of national identity, and beyond the cinematic frame, to include expanded, hybrid, Indigenous, experimental, transmedial, dispersed, and practice-led forms?
We aim to bring together scholars, practitioners, and creative researchers to explore expanded documentary as both a conceptual framework and a field of practice. Following the symposium, appropriate submissions will be selected for a curated publication of scholarly and creative research outputs.
Keynote speaker
Professor Anne Goldson ONZM is a filmmaker whose best-known films are the documentary features Punitive Damage, Georgie Girl, An Island Calling, Brother Number One, and Kim Dotcom: Caught in the Web. She is also a scholar, regularly publishing academic articles and book chapters and is a Professor of Communication at the University of Auckland/Waipapa Taumata Rau. Annie has received over 60 awards at international film festivals, holds an Officer of the Order of Merit NZ, is a Fellow of the Te Apārangi/Royal Society of New Zealand, an Arts Laureate of NZ, and recently received the DocEdge Superhero award.
Other keynotes to be announced.
Call for Proposals
The conference organisers invite intrepid scholarly and creative responses that engage with the theme of expanded documentary in Aotearoa New Zealand. Topics may include (but are not limited to):
- Expanded, hybrid, or experimental documentary forms
- Indigenous approaches to documentation and storytelling
- Documentary beyond the screen (installation, designerly, performance, Verbatim theatre, dance, audio podcast, radio docs, artefact, spatial media)
- Transmedial, dispersed, viral, and social impact documentary
- Practice-led or creative research in nonfiction media
- Documentary ecologies; changing media and technologies (analogue, i-docs, online forms, VR/AR, etc.)
- Ethics, politics, and epistemologies of documentary
- Reconsiderations of documentary history in Aotearoa
- Decolonising/Indigenising the documentary lens
- Animated documentary / animation in documentary
- Found footage film, foraging, bricolage, and avant-garde approaches to assemblage
- Archival excavation, remediation, and détournement
- Articulating documentary through sound, music, media, and design, including music video and visual music
- Innovations in lens-based and camera-less documentary practices
- Documentary photography – relations between static and moving images • Documentary and place-making
- Therapeutic possibilities of documentary practice, process, and reception • The role of documentary in relation to kaleidoscopic justice
- Documentary as intervention into judicial process, outcomes, and criminal law • Expanded approaches to journalistic documentary
- Expanded approaches to documentary authorship, distribution, and reception - via social media
- Documentary as an agent for activism, protest, and rebellion
We welcome the following submission types:
- Individual scholarly papers (20 minutes, including 5 minutes Q&A) • Panel proposals (3 speakers: 20 minutes each, plus 15 minutes Q&A) • Creative submissions (film/video work, installations, performances, artefacts, or other practice-based contributions)
Please submit an abstract or creative proposal (including any space and AV requirements) by 25 September 2026 to: cherie.lacey@waikato.ac.nz
In your abstract/proposal, please indicate whether you would prefer an online or in-person presentation.
Notification of acceptance: 2 November 2026
Conference organisers
Cherie Lacey is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Creative Technologies at the University of Waikato, and a Research Affiliate with the University of Auckland. Cherie’s research is grounded in creative nonfiction in film and writing, with a particular focus on the use of first person storytelling modes in the exploration of conscious and unconscious minds.
Lisa Perrott is Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Media and Creative Technologies at The University of Waikato. Her research explores the relations between sound, music and image, together with the remediating possibilities of audiovisual media and cultural forms. Lisa's interest in music, artistry, and representation informs her research across the fields of documentary, animation, cultural memory, transmedia and Indigenous storytelling practices.
Conference Dates: Monday 19 & Tues 20 April 2027
Format: In-person
Location: The Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
Registration fees:
- Faculty members: $350.00
- Independent and student: $190.00
Hosted by: The Faculty of Design, Te Kura Toi the School of Arts, Te Wānanga o Ngā Kete the Division of Arts, Law, Psychology and Social Sciences (ALPSS)