My research examines how instances of placelessness are spatialised in film and documentary formats, focusing on the way in which  loss of home is made intelligible through media infrastructures (Chun, 2006; Easterling, 2014). It argues that in Western mainstream media, placelessness is often aestheticised or presented as crisis or threat depending on the subject's position and privilege (Wojcik, 2020; Pisters, 2012). By understanding the aesthetics and phenomenology of mediatised placelessness (Bachelard, 1958; Flaxman, 2001; Merleau-Ponty, 1945), and by analysing the media infrastructure in which they exist, this project aims to understand the imaginaries and spatial dimensions through which the displaced are seen and surveilled.

My dissertation lies at the intersection of memory studies, immigration studies, the study of revolutions, and the cinematic representation of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 . It is accompanied by an essay documentary that traces a personal and political journey: the process of applying for a student U.S. visa, traveling to Pakistan, during the COVID-19 pandemic to obtain it, followed by a three-week period of precarious residency and a perilous nighttime return to Iran via the most dangerous border crossing between Iran and Pakistan—accompanied by strangers. This journey exists because there is no U.S. embassy in Iran, and no space for dissenting voices. Tragically, mass migration has come to define the lived experience of multiple generations. Through this research, I examine the revolution’s cinematic afterlife and attempt to map what I call the “geography of dreams” for those living in exile, or in search of freedom.

Through an examination of the colonoscopy’s millennium-long history, this videographic essay posits human body, technology of vision, and medical procedure as co-constitutive elements which have developed in tandem with each other, and demonstrates how the procedure’s technological developments were conducive to its journey beyond the operating room, into the sphere of entertainment. My work complicates José Van Dijk’s account of the colonoscopy as a means of effecting complete control over the human interior by highlighting the epistemic anxieties surrounding the procedure since its inception, and which continue to manifest in new forms. Often an object of derision or feared to be unknowable around the turn of the 20th century, the colon remains a site resistant to legibility; and it is through examining these ambivalences that we are able to track shifting relations between interior space and human mind and body more broadly. 

My dissertation argues that widely accessible non-linear audiovisual editing practices have reconstituted many of the experimental and experiential potentials of LGBTQ+ cinema and television through videographic criticism. By layering form and content, method and manifestation, and viewership and embodiment, I examine specific formations of media, meta-media production, and videographic phenomenology in order to speciate what I refer to as queer audiovisualities of perception, spatiotemporality, and embodiment. I delineate three tendencies of videographic work: (1) representing media perception with empirical neuroscience; (2) (re)theorizing cinematic and televisual spatiotemporality visually and aurally; (3) experimenting with sounds and images for uncharted, under-theorized embodied encounters and disavowals. Together, they provide a set of procedures that configure the aberrant, contingent, transgressive, fluid, and erotic in queer cinema and television to speculate what makes videographic studies queer.

How do fans, authors and auteurs, academics, and corporations define sf across time? How might the drawing together of literary and cinematic texts through such means as shifting fan engagement, collaborative efforts between filmmakers and authors, interconnected political or aesthetic goals, and contestations over ownership and canonicity highlight how literary sf and film sf evolve together across time and in different production and reception contexts? How do these moments exemplify how sf literature and sf film shape understandings of the genre in relation to one another? I argue for considering film and literary sf as analogous and concomitant sites of genre production and evolution rather than existing in distinct and separate spheres. In my dissertation, I draw the two media together to argue that various contigent’s attempts to legitimize the genre through a medium-specific binary does not draw film and literary sf apart, but instead discursively establishes sf as an intermedial genre.

In 2016, the signing of Colombia’s Peace Agreement marked a pivotal moment for approximately 3,500 female FARC-EP combatants transitioning into civilian life. My research explores how these women embody the post-agreement period, navigating expectations shaped by state, media, and their own political party. The peace process framed the end of armed conflict as a temporal rupture, inaugurating a future of reconciliation and coexistence. Within this discourse, female ex-combatants emerged as emblematic figures of peacebuilding, expected to reconcile their past as insurgents with roles rooted in traditional gender norms. Yet, their lived experiences reveal complex tensions between social expectations, political ambiguity, and material precarity. Informed by phenomenological approaches, my project explores how experiences of war and its aftermath often escape language—how some dimensions of memory, pain, and transformation resist articulation and are instead expressed through the body. 

The essay film, a cinematic tradition that often relies on nonlinearity, offers a steady starting point for researching a cinematic counterpart to the Palestinian lived experience and national struggle. My thesis argues that a nonlinear filmic approach profoundly reflects the Palestinian temporal experience.  A specific practice of essay filmmaking, which Catherine Russell names “archiveology”, uses archival materials as an integral part of its film construction – inevitably making time, history, and memory a thematic focus in the process. It is in this context that I ask how such archival essay films represent the Palestinian experience, and as an extension, how these films may contribute to the Palestinian struggle and take part in the longstanding tradition of cinema of opposition. Building on Gil Hochberg's concept of “archival imagination” I ask how archival essay films may imagine a future in the Palestinian context, in a combined effort that I will call “imaginative archiveogoly."