Conference Agenda

Students from Rowan’s 2025 Anthropology Through Film course discuss the challenges of making their first ethnographic films. Topics under discussion will include: How they navigated the communities they documented in their work, the ethical questions they faced, how they built trust with their participants while maintaining focus on their research objectives, and how their personal ties with these communities affected their outlook and interpretations. Issues of cultural survival, structural violence, and individual agency are addressed across multiple projects which deal with topics as varied as the complex and painful legacy of the 1980s “War on Drugs” in the black community of Philadelphia to the complex role the Polish Catholic Church plays in preserving Polish traditions in migrant communities in the United States and, finally, the effects on personal and academic life of university students after the legalization of cannabis products in the state of New Jersey.

(Contributors: Donovan Cruz, Fiona Hennigan, Tiana Martin, and Richard Murphy. Three film projects will be screened as part of the discussion.)