As part of a post-doctoral plan of activities, Ms Ngozi Marion Emmanuel, a post-doc at the School of Media, Communication and Sociology, organised a workshop on Cinema as Protest, to advance some of the discussions from an initial workshop on “Films and the Rest of Us” and co-create a toolkit for portraying disabilities in films.
The online workshop which was held on Friday the 24th of February 2023 had in attendance people with disabilities from the diaspora and the UK, especially people of ethnic minorities with disabilities. Filmmakers and disability rights advocates from academia and industry were also in attendance.
Starting off the workshop, the facilitator Sean Callaghan highlighted the benefits of the previous workshop on disability rights and some of the testimonials received from non-academic beneficiaries who attended the workshop. Sean explained that the second workshop was aimed at consolidating some of the findings and recommendations from the first workshop.
The organiser, Ms Emmanuel, reiterated the commitment to co-produce knowledge with beneficiaries on the representation of disabilities in the media. According to her, the aim of the workshop was to produce a working toolkit that can be used by filmmakers and other content producers in portraying and talking about disabilities.
The workshop lasted three hours with participants producing knowledge that informed the first working toolkit on portraying disabilities in films. Primary areas of recommendation included the language used in dialogues, accessibility, costuming and sincerity in representations through the inclusion of people with disabilities themselves as actors and crew members.