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Epistemic Decolonization of Migration: Digital Witnessing of Crisis and Borders in For Sama

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Abstract

This chapter analyses how digital witnessing of migration in documentary auto-ethnography contributes towards epistemic decolonization. I focus on For Sama (Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts, 2019) as a case study, a letter-film that memorializes key events in al-Kateab’s everyday life during the Syrian Civil War that shaped her decision to migrate to Europe. By considering the relation between documentary, citizen media, and decoloniality, I argue that digital witnessing in For Sama provides affective access to migration motivations that challenges their reductionist categorization and pluralizes audience understanding of ‘crisis’ and ‘borders’.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: July 13, 2022 | Accepted: Oct. 21, 2022 | Published Jan. 26, 2023 | Language: en

Keywords Migrant Voices • Decoloniality of knowledge • Documentary auto-ethnography • Borderscape • Crisis ordinariness

Copyright © 2023 Nadica Denić. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-677-0/006


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