My doctoral thesis is available to download here. The thesis was the written component of a research by practice PhD. Drawing on Autism, a short animated documetnary which served as a key practice artefact, is available here. My doctoral research was part of the Autism through Cinema project at Queen Mary University of London, which was funded by the Wellcome Trust (209795/Z/17/Z).
Abstract: Animated documentary scholarship has grown significantly but the ethics of this practice remains under explored. Animated documentaries afford their filmmakers greater responsibility over the visual representation of participants, while the practice’s aptitude for evoking mental phenomena
has resulted in a tendency to focus on narratives featuring marginalised participants. Animation increases the number of creative decisions made in these documentaries, multiplying the opportunities to express unconscious bias. This may manifest in the film’s aesthetics, including the use of problematic stereotypes or the othering of participants. Autism representation is a useful topic for examining animated documentary ethics because members of the autistic community have authored a framework for ethics, the neurodiversity paradigm. Three areas of existing scholarship are explored: the neurodiversity paradigm, live-action documentary ethics, and animated
documentary theory. Four existing animated documentaries that attempt to represent autistic participants are analysed: Hole, an autobiographical film, Mm-Hmm, co-directed by the non-autistic sibling of an autistic participant, An Alien in the Playground, directed by a non-autistic filmmaker with no existing connection to their participant, and A is for Autism, which adopts a collaborative method where a non-autistic filmmaker and autistic participants share creative responsibilities. Through research by film practice, a new method of ethical production was developed during the creation of Drawing on Autism, a short animated documentary featuring one autistic participant. This film set the template for the development of Divergent Minds, a long form animated documentary featuring five autistic participants. While this film remains a work in progress, the narrative structure is complete, and some scenes have been developed into animatics. The original contribution of this thesis is a method for ethically producing animated documentary films, what I
term the collaborative reflexive cycle, which relies on four means for mitigating the aforementioned risks: participant collaboration, positional reflexivity, textual reflexivity, and filmmaker self-scrutiny.
Documentary Animation Discourse 