The 2023 BEA Book Award has been awarded to Kathleen M. Ryan, University of Colorado Boulder and David Staton, University of Northern Colorado (Editors) for Interactive Documentary: Decolonizing Practice-Based Research (Routledge, 2022).
Editors Kathleen M. Ryan and David Staton have curated a collection of chapters written by a global cohort of scholars to explore the ways that interactive documentary as a field of study reveals an even broader reach and definition of humanistic inquiry itself. The contributors included here highlight how emerging digital technologies, collaborative approaches to storytelling, and conceptualizations of practice as research facilitate a deeper engagement with the humanistic inquiry at the center of documentary storytelling, while at the same time providing agency and voice to groups typically excluded from positions of authority within documentary and practice-based research, as a whole. This collection represents a key contribution to the important, and vocal, debates within the field about how to avoid replicating colonial practices and privileging.
Kathleen M. Ryan is a documentary filmmaker and an associate professor of journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her hybrid work focuses on transformations in storytelling due to shifting media technologies. Specifically, she explores the intersection of theory and praxis within evolving media forms such as interactive documentary. Her projects deal with issues of gender, self-identity, visuality, and user/participant agency.
David Staton is an associate professor at the University of Northern Colorado where he teaches in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies. His areas of research include visual communication, ethics, and sports journalism. He has been involved in the production of three feature-length documentary films, which have been screened internationally. Ghost Resort, his first experimental documentary short, is now at festival.
The BEA Book Award was established in 2020 to recognize an outstanding book written by a BEA member(s) in the field of broadcasting and mass communication. Each year the recipient will be recognized at BEA’s annual convention in Las Vegas.
