Events

Rangan’s talk, drawn from a book coauthored with Brett Story, examines the contradictions of documentary “access” as both moral imperative and coveted cinematic currency. Prompted by a case in which an Afghan informant was allegedly identified and killed after appearing in a U.S. war documentary, it treats access to restricted or dangerous environments—especially prisons—as a governing and often compromised logic of production. Tracing its legal history back to Titicut Follies (1967), Rangan argues that carceral access neoliberalizes documentary by recasting harm as a matter of individual ethics rather than a collective struggle. She concludes by turning to disability justice and abolitionist efforts to reimagine access as collective and care-based.

Pooja Rangan is an award-winning scholar whose work rethinks the ethics and politics of documentary. She is Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Amherst College and a Visiting Scholar at Visualizing Abolition (UC Santa Cruz). Rangan is the author of The Documentary Audit (2025), Thinking with an Accent (as co-editor, 2023), and Immediations (2017), co-editor of the Investigating Visible Evidence series at Columbia University Press, and host of the Unmaking the Prison Image podcast. She is currently coauthoring a book with filmmaker Brett Story on documentary and carceral power.