[Commlist] Call for Papers: Conference Home Frames: Documentary and the Domestic Space

      Call For Papers: /Home Frames/: Documentary and the Domestic Space


      June 16th-17th 2026, Hosted by the Centre for Documentary
      Research at Queen’s University Belfast.


      https://www.qub.ac.uk/research-centres/cdr/home_frames/



Keynote Speakers:


        Professor Laura Rascaroli (University College Cork)

        Mark Cousins (Honorary Professor in Film Studies, Queen’s
        University Belfast)




      Deadline for Abstracts: March 1st, 2026 


The domestic space has long occupied a peculiar position within 
documentary cinema. At once intimate and ordinary, private and 
politically charged, the home has served as a site of testimony, 
observation, performance, labour, and memory. From early observational 
documentaries to autobiographical and essayistic forms, from television 
documentary to contemporary hybrid and digital practices, domestic space 
has functioned not merely as a backdrop but as a structuring environment 
through which knowledge about class, society and identity are produced. 

This conference invites scholars and practitioners to explore the 
relationship between documentary filmmaking and domestic space, 
understood as a material, social, and representational site shaped by 
historical, economic, and cultural forces. Rather than treating the home 
as a neutral setting, the conference foregrounds domestic space as an 
active and timely agent in documentary form: one that conditions modes 
of address, ethical relations, production practices, and spectatorship.

Domestic spaces are entangled with questions of care, gendered labour, 
class, migration, precarity, and everyday life. They are also 
increasingly central to contemporary documentary production, 
particularly in contexts marked by limited resources, self-filming 
practices, platform circulation, and post-pandemic reconfigurations of 
screen work. Documentary engagements with the home invite reflection on 
proximity and distance, visibility and concealment, and the politics of 
filming intimate environments.


The conference welcomes contributions that examine domestic space across 
documentary history and practice, including (but not limited to) the 
following themes:


– Documentary filmmaking in and about domestic interiors

– The home as a site of intimacy, testimony, and ethical negotiation

– home in autobiographical, first-person, and essayistic documentary 
practices

– Domestic labour, care, and gendered spaces in documentary cinema

– Housing, class, and social inequality in documentary production

– The politics of access, consent, and filming private space

– Archival, amateur, and home-movie practices in documentary contexts

– Documentary production under conditions of constraint: self-shooting, 
low-budget, and domestic infrastructures

– Television documentary, observational traditions, and everyday life

– Platform documentary, streaming, and the reconfiguration of domestic 
spectatorship

– Practice-as-research approaches to documentary and domestic space

– Transnational and diasporic homes in documentary narratives

– Housing crisis and documentary practice.


This conference aims to bring together theoretical, historical, 
industrial, and practice-based perspectives, fostering dialogue between 
film and media studies, documentary studies, screen industries research, 
and creative practice.

This conference will be held in conjunction with Docs Ireland 
International Documentary Film Festival 2026 (16th to 21st). All 
accepted delegates will receive a full pass to Docs Ireland screenings, 
panel discussions, and other events. 


Conference Fee: £100 Salaried/ £70 Students


        We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers, short films or media,
        practice-based presentations or pre-constituted panels.


A 200-word abstract alongside a 100-word biography and/or any questions 
should be submitted by emailing:


      (documentaryresearch /at/ qub.ac.uk)

Applicants will be notified about the decision of 
the Conference Committee by the 27th of April, 2026

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