Image credit: Lisá Perrott
Expanded Documentary in Aotearoa brings together scholars, artists, practitioners and creative researchers to explore what documentary might be—or become—in Aotearoa New Zealand today. Inspired by Jihoon Kim’s concept of documentary’s “expanded fields,” the conference moves beyond conventional cinematic forms and frames to consider expanded, hybrid, Indigenous, experimental and practice-led approaches to documenting and storytelling.
Aotearoa provides a particularly generative context for this exploration. From installation, photography and animation to embodied, digital and mixed-media practices, the conference invites dialogue between contemporary documentary practices and Māori forms of storytelling and knowledge transmission, while reconsidering the histories and assumptions that have shaped documentary scholarship in Aotearoa.
Emergent digital technologies and platforms reshape the image, vision, apparatus, memory, and activism of documentary cinema.
— Jihoon Kim, Documentary’s Expanded Fields (2022)
Call for proposals
The conference organisers invite scholarly and creative responses engaging with expanded documentary in Aotearoa New Zealand. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Expanded, hybrid, experimental and Indigenous documentary forms
- Documentary beyond the screen, including installation, performance, theatre, dance, sound, radio/podcasting, artefacts and spatial media
- Photography, animation, lens-based and camera-less documentary practices
- Digital, interactive, transmedial and social media documentary
- Practice-led and creative research in nonfiction media
- Documentary ecologies and changing media technologies
- Found footage, archival excavation, remediation, bricolage and assemblage
- Documentary, sound, music and design
- Documentary and place-making
- Ethics, politics and epistemologies of documentary
- Decolonising and Indigenising documentary practice and scholarship
- Reconsiderations of documentary histories in Aotearoa
- Documentary as activism, intervention, social impact and justice
- Expanded approaches to documentary authorship, distribution and reception
Submission types
– individual scholarly papers (20 minutes, including Q&A)
– three-person panel proposals (120 mins, including Q&A)
– creative or practice-based contributions, including film/video, installation, photography, performance and artefacts
– creative showcases with Q&A (~30 minutes).
Please submit an abstract or creative proposal of approximately 300 words, including any space or AV requirements, by 9 October 2026 to cherie.lacey@waikato.ac.nz
Notification of acceptance: 2 November 2026
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