Although there are many ways that neighborhoods such as my own, often described as Super-, or otherwise Gentrified (Halasz 2018). the fact remains that many of its residents fall on the liberal and left-leaning spectrum of American politics. It is also a place that has been an area accurately described as exhibiting Super Diversity (Vertovec 2007). Although the area is “diverse,” People of Color, mostly a diverse collection of Latino residents, tend to dominate in sections that are slowly undergoing displacement pressures as the rapid construction of high-rise “luxury” apartments continues unabated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
” You can be free in prison and imprisoned while free”
Description: The protagonists of this film have spent their lives searching for freedom, while at the same time escaping loneliness. The choices they made each time led them to new trials, and life punished them again and again. They come into conflict with the law, their parents turn their backs on them, their partners abandon them, but they carry on with their lives without really knowing where to or what for. The stories of their lives are similar and at the same time the path of each was different. What does it mean to live properly, to be “like everyone else”, not to fall by the wayside, how to find the one and those who need you? The heroes of the film were at death’s door, they started from zero, fell to the bottom, spent many years behind bars… At some point they found out about a religious community whose ministers help people who are in a difficult life situation. And now the heroes of the film, in their opinion, are on their way to long-awaited freedom. This longed-for freedom has already taken a lot away – time, youth, health, friends.
The video is a journey through Boeng Trabaek channel, a sewage and storm water drain which runs through south end of the city of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Filmed and edited by Dr Emit Snake-Beings over the two months spent crossing ‘stink canal’ on a daily basis, whilst staying in the city January – February 2019.
“La sociologie comme elle s’apprend” is the filmic narrative of a learning process—both of a discipline (with its scientific norms, analytic frames and methods) and of critical thinking on the social. Emphasizing the articulation between the international circulation of sociological theories and the localised reality of fieldwork in a provincial town in Russia, this documentary follows Russian students engaged in a French curriculum at the State Universities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg during a week of fieldwork internship. While most of these students never learned sociology or ethnography before, this internship, which is organised every year, is always very intensive. During a full week, we have meetings after meetings to talk about students’ difficulties in the field and help them formulating research questions. My job can also imply joining them in the field to support them and negotiate interviews if needed. And when they come back, late in the evening, after a day of observations and interviews, we talk about their results even if that is in the middle of the night. This is generally a 19/24h mentoring, as exhausting as it is stimulating.
My book was published in March 2019 by Palgrave MacMillan. The book includes photographs by myself, in addition to work from Ed Ruscha, Joel Sternfeld, Richard Misrach, Roy Arden, Wout Berger, Mikael Levin. An eclectic book that will make a critical contribution to other disciplines beyond visual sociology.
