Fieldwork, Old and New (June/July 2014)

Thanks to a University Research Grant from Emory, I was able to travel to China this summer for a five-week-long trip to keep developing my new research project on rural media, with a particular focus on locally-based Miao videographers in and around Kaili, Guizhou, and the documentary films that are being produced by rural filmmakers through a community media project called "Eye of Villager" (乡村之眼), based in Kunming, Yunnan. There is simply so much media-making happening in these regions that the project is expanding in a lot of exciting ways, which I hope to think and write about over the next few months.

At the same time, I was also able to give copies of my book to some of the people who have helped me so much during that research, including people in Upper Jidao and Ping'an villages. It's eye-opening, always, to see how much these villages have changed in the past few years. 

Here's a small gallery of my photographs, showing some of the things I'm looking at, and mulling over, now.