Angela Aguayo selected as 2024-25 Humanities Research Institute Faculty Fellow
Angela Aguayo, associate professor of media and cinema studies and acting director of the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies, has been selected as a 2024-25 Humanities Research Institute Faculty Fellow.
As an HRI Faculty Fellow, Aguayo will be provided with research funds and one semester of release time to work on a new book, titled Collective Matters: Documentary Film Practice and Public Engagement in the US, 1970-Present.
Her book will address the micro-practices of public engagement with documentary production that have led to sustained media culture. When the larger culture is deeply divided, the traditions and strategies of community-centered documentary storytelling build connections between people.
“There is a long tradition of communities representing themselves, acquiring equipment, pinning a sheet to a wall, and projecting images made by the community for the community,” Aguayo said. “These early films addressed social problems, local needs, and aspired to compel hearts rather than turn profits. This tradition had evolved over the years, shaped by technological innovation and years of connecting media-making with communities who need validation, visibility, and representation.”
Drawing upon research in media, communication, and cultural studies, and informed by interviews with media workers, filmmakers, and activists, the book will consider how community-centered documentary storytelling provides frameworks for larger civic-sector conversations.
“These are the types of media that start and sustain conversations in the world, beyond the screening room, about what could and should be done to activate the conditions for a more equitable and just world,” Aguayo added.
Aguayo will join six other faculty members and seven graduate students who will meet at the Humanities Research Institute throughout the year to address how they are rethinking research paradigms. She will take leave from teaching for the Fall 2024 semester.
The upcoming project will be Aguayo’s third book. Her first book was a reader on theories of public argumentation. Her second book, Documentary Resistance, addressed the possibilities for documentary and social change.
HRI grants fellowships to Illinois faculty and graduate students, who spend the year engaged in research and writing. All HRI Fellows participate in HRI activities, including the yearlong Fellows Seminar.
HRI’s 2024-25 theme, “Think Again...,” is an invitation to revisit well-known texts, to upend dominant narratives, to historicize what appears self-evident in the present, and/or to ask what happens when we juxtapose x with y in ways never been done before. “Think Again” underscores the opportunity to think across diverse interdisciplinary formations, and to identify when, how, and under what conditions new ones may be happening.
—Kelly Youngblood