[Commlist] CFP: Risible Evidence – Special Dossier on Mockumentary and Comic Documentary in a Post-Truth Media Ecology

The scholarship on mockumentary has long identified its capacity for 
critical reflexivity. By replicating formal strategies and codes of the 
documentary, mockumentaries can challenge the sobriety of the subject 
matter, levy critiques at the broader moral, social, and political 
orders, and reveal the “hidden fabrications of ‘real’ documentaries” 
(Juhasz and Lerner, 2006: 2). Accordingly, these texts supply a 
necessary intervention into the intersections of truth, power, and 
knowledge that coalesce and convene in documentary media and other 
discourses of sobriety. They playfully and purposefully challenge the 
authority documentary does and has claimed over the real.

But how do we understand their work in the context of a contemporary 
“post-truth” era— broadly understood as the waning status of facticity 
compared to belief and opinion? Nonfiction media have played a central 
role in this shift in multiple ways. Financial challenges to legacy 
media have led to the loss of fact-checkers and the rise of click-bait. 
Social media platforms offer little oversight on the claims made, 
providing occasions for mis- and dis-information to be circulated, 
whether in satire presumed to be earnest at best and pernicious 
conspiracy theories and incitements to violence at worst. Deep Fakes 
further complicate evidentiary security. And amidst what the WHO is 
calling an “infodemic,” autocrats worldwide are actively combatting 
dissent, whether by crying “fake news” or by enforcement through new 
laws. Under these conditions, how do we understand the mockumentary’s 
work in deconstructing and reflecting on the documentary (form, aims, 
truth claims)? And if the purpose of mockumentary is not only to undo 
but “redo” documentary, in what ways can it contribute to the rebuilding 
of documentary?

We are looking for contributions to a dossier to be published in 
/Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media/ in Summer 2025.  This 
dossier provides a timely occasion to reflect on definitions, practices 
and processes of mockumentary, satire, and comic documentary when 
documentary authority is so fraught—for better and for worse—and to 
ponder what the current context means for the state of visible and 
risible evidence.

While we are open to all possible reflections, we are looking in 
particular for works that expand the global discussion of mockumentary 
beyond North America and the United Kingdom—to draw on alternative 
histories, experiences with autocracies, and those challenges to ever 
having lived in a world of pure “truth”.

If you are interested, please submit an abstract to Ohad Landesman 
((lander /at/ tauex.tau.ac.il) <mailto:(lander /at/ tauex.tau.ac.il)>) and Leshu 
Torchin ((lt40 /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk) <mailto:(lt40 /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk)>) no later 
than July 15th, 2024 with the intention of having a 7000-word essay 
submitted by October 2024 for editing and preparation.

(No payment from the authors will be required).



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