Published on 07-11-2025, Last modified on 07-11-2025
Workshop ‘Making the Invisible Visible’
Co-creative cinematographic storytelling across Indigenous and legal worlds
This workshop invites PhD students and postdoctoral researchers to engage in a collective reflection on the transformative experience of co-developing a pair of “twin documentaries” as part of legal ethnographic research in Nepal and Colombia conducted within the framework of the ERC research project RIVERS: Human Rights Beyond the Human? (2019-2026). Bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous filmmakers, researchers, and artists, the session explores how co-creative visual storytelling and socio-legal research can intersect to construct narratives that genuinely reflect Indigenous perspectives on nature, law, and justice.
Through co-creative processes involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous storytellers, artists, and academics, the documentaries embody a transdisciplinary experiment in both method and politics. By blending immersive cinematography with collaborative narrative-building, they reveal the tensions between Indigenous knowledge systems and extractivist-driven legal orders, while offering glimpses of alternative legal futures rooted in pluralism, spirituality, and resistance.
The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to critically engage with the ethical, political, and methodological stakes of visual storytelling in contexts marked by colonial legacies, environmental violence, and struggles for Indigenous rights. Together, we will reflect on the challenges of translating complex academic debates on Indigenous legal onto-epistemics into cinematographic languages accessible to broader publics without diluting their depth or transformative potential.
Participants will gain:
– Insights into the methodological synergies between legal ethnography and audiovisual co-creation.
– Practical tools for engaging in collaborative, transdisciplinary research with Indigenous and local communities.
– Critical reflections on the ethical and political dimensions of visual storytelling in contexts of environmental justice and Indigenous rights.
The session will include an interactive dialogue with an Indigenous judge from Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace— the main protagonists of Aty Seikuinduwa—and members of the Indigenous creative team from Nepal involved in Marsyangdi Wile Ri’iba. These exchanges will invite discussion on how balancing academic rigour with artistic expression can deepen both scholarly and societal engagement with the urgent question of how humans relate to nature in the Anthropocene.
Designed as an interactive workshop, the session will combine footage screenings, short presentations, and open discussions with the Indigenous judge, the RIVERS research team, and the creative collaborators from Nepal and Spain. PhD students will participate as discussants and in small-group reflections on the methodological and ethical challenges of co-creative research practices.
This workshop forms part of the Human Rights Research Network, Members of the Conflict Research Group, and the Doctoral School Seminar Series “Building Capacities – Meet the Expert”, offering early-career researchers’ direct exposure to innovative, cross-disciplinary, and intercultural research methodologies. This activity is organized in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Stephan Parmentier from the Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC), Faculty of Law and Criminology, KU Leuven