As graduate research in the humanities continues to open toward new forms of scholarly communication, students and degree-granting programs are increasingly open to rethinking the “traditional” written dissertation through practice-based approaches and “alternative” modes of scholarly communication. In some cases, this has included experiments incorporating videographic criticism as a component of doctoral research (e.g., Galibert-Laîné 2021; Scott 2024; Donnelly 2025). Yet for students and, often, for practitioners of videographic scholarship alike, the challenge frequently becomes one of translation and transposition: how to move an argument from the written to the audiovisual. While this impulse is understandable and a particularly valuable challenge in its own right, it also risks treating videographic scholarship as an audiovisual rendering of ideas whose terms have already been fixed elsewhere (Grant 2013; Laird 2024). The 2025 workshop Reframing the Argument: Videographic Criticism as Graduate Research Practice emerged as a pedagogical intervention into this impulse. While asking students to draw on their respective expertise from existing theses or dissertation projects, the workshop was designed to train students in specially-devised videographic exercises that encouraged them to reconsider their projects and reframe their research process through the affordances and constraints of audiovisual thinking.

Developed as a collaboration between Ariel Avissar (Tel Aviv University), Colleen Laird (University of British Columbia), Matthew Thomas Payne (University of Notre Dame), and Barbara Zecchi (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Reframing the Argument brought together 14 graduate students working across a diversity of disciplines and geographic contexts with established videographic scholars for an intensive, five-day, in-residence workshop at the University of Notre Dame in June, 2025. The workshop was fully funded thanks to the generous support of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Connections Grant, a Tel Aviv University/Notre Dame Joint Workshop Grant, and additional funding from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Through a series of project-specific exercises, on-site collective screening and discussion, and sustained mentorship beyond the in-person events, participants were invited to move beyond adapting their theses or dissertations for the screen and instead reconsider them through videographic practice. The eight works collected in this special issue are the result of that process, each shaped by the experiments and discoveries that emerged during the workshop.

In both its structure and pedagogical philosophy, Reframing the Argument built on earlier workshop models in videographic scholarship, particularly the formative Scholarship in Sound & Image workshop, co-founded by Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell that runs annually at Middlebury College, and the Embodying the Video Essay workshop held at Bowdoin College in 2023, co-organized by Joel Burges, Allison Cooper, Lucy Fife Donaldson, Colleen Laird, Dayna McLeod, and Alison Peirse. Like those initiatives, Reframing the Argument was structured by principles of collective making, shared critique, mentorship, and constraint-based exercises the likes of which have been formative in fostering videographic ways of thinking (e.g., Keathley and Mittell 2019; O’Leary 2021; Cox-Stanton 2025). At the same time, it departed from these models by centering graduate students and by designing exercises specifically around the challenge of rethinking written research projects. It consisted of a series of exercises devised collaboratively by Avissar and Laird (unless otherwise specified), starting with a single image in the first assignment and ending with a fully-realized work of videographic argumentation. These included two pre-workshop exercises, two on-site exercises, and a final project.

Structured as a gradual progression to develop videographic modes of thinking, each exercise introduced a different set of formal and rhetorical constraints. The sequence began with the Keyword/Keyframe exercise, inspired by Johannes Binotto’s “Performative Thinking Image” prompt (designed for the Embodying the Video Essay workshop) and Avissar’s “TV Dictionary” project. This exercise asked participants to engage with distillation to reconceptualize complex research projects into a single, potent visual-textual composition, by pairing one word from their writing with a still image (however assembled or manipulated) made from their primary sources.

Building directly on this, The Audio Epigraph—inspired by the “Videographic Epigraph” exercise modeled after the work of Catherine Grant (Keathley and Mittell 2019)—introduced a shift in scope from one word to one sentence, as well as in form from purely visual distillation to temporal and sonic articulation. Makers paired a sentence drawn from their own research, ideally connected to the word chosen for the previous exercise, with manipulated audio and no additional imagery in order to convey their idea through text-as-image. Treating written language as visual material that can be reworked and manipulated as durational, kinetic imagery, participants could thus explore how the tonal and rhythmic juxtaposition of sound and written text might change or inform how an idea was articulated.

Next, participants moved beyond a reliance on text with The [in]Visible Sentence. Inspired by the “Ways of Doing” collective’s “Conceptual Epigraph” (and with a titular gesture to the first academic journal of videographic criticism), this exercise asked makers to reuse the same sentence and audio from the previous exercise, but to remove the written text entirely and instead convey the same ideas through non-textual imagery drawn from their primary sources. This required participants to think in a more audiovisual manner using their research materials, trusting the interaction of sound and moving image to communicate the essence of an idea without the anchor of written language, now rendered “invisible.” This completed a triad of provocations beginning with the first exercise: 1. Word and image; 2. Word as image and sound; 3. Image and sound without words.

Finally, participants engaged with The Videographic Dissection, previously devised by Avissar (2024) and inspired by the desktop documentary work of Kevin B. Lee (2012) and Lého Galibert-Laîné (2019). This exercise shifted focus from videographic expression to the methodological process of videographic analysis itself. By using screen-capture to document the dissection and manipulation of media on the timeline, participants treated the editing software not merely as an assembly tool, but as a site for generating new research methodologies and exposing “internal workings” that were not apparent through traditional viewing. A selection of these “videographic dissections” will be published as part of a special issue of Open Screens (Avissar, Laird, Payne, and Zecchi 2026, forthcoming).

The workshop culminated in the Final Project, for which participants were encouraged to select as their starting point one or more of the pieces they had created in response to the previous exercises, and develop them into standalone, legible works. Rather than resolving the experimental fragments generated by the earlier exercises, the Final Project asked makers to rework them at a different scale, directly embracing videographic inquiry and confronting the challenge of communicative legibility in audiovisual form. Participants were asked to explore their research anew and to consider how they could make established scholarly work accessible to broader audiences, all while providing only the “bare minimum” of explanatory, language-reliant contextualization within the video itself. The works collected in this special issue emerged from this negotiation between procedural experimentation and communicative legibility.

Rotem Sudman’s “Is There a ‘Right Time’ for the Palestinian (Image)? Or: A Videographic Attempt at Tracing an Ongoing Catastrophe” engages with the complexities of Palestinian temporality by tracing the “ongoing Nakba” as a state of perpetual waiting and displacement. Using an offset grid, the video juxtaposes 1960s/70s archival footage with contemporary images of Gaza and an “electronic-noise remix” of UN genocide proceedings that juxtaposes the past with the present amid a cacophony of political discourse. Sudman’s work argues for the ethical responsibility of reactivating the archive, eventually turning to a black screen and the voice of Palestinian poet Areej Kaoud to acknowledge the limits of representation in the face of unrepresentable anguish.

Celia Sainz’s “Timeline Dripping” interrogates the aesthetics of oil, examining how petroleum simultaneously embodies hedonic exuberance and environmental catastrophe. The video employs a “disjunctive” methodology, colliding pop music videos from artists like Rosalía with footage of the Deepwater Horizon and Prestige oil spills. By using multiscreen devices and a “cloning tool” that allows oil to literally seep through the editing timeline, Sainz uses the video essay to function as an ecocritical tool that makes visible the “slow violence” of petromodernity.

Inha Park’s “Equivalence without Equality” offers a visual archive of Italian marginalized urban spaces historically labeled “Sciangai” and “Corea.” The piece uses rapid, side-by-side juxtaposition of Italian newsreels and archival footage of wartime Shanghai and Korea to expose how Italy “othered” its own internal populations through Italian Orientalism. Park’s statement details how the editing process revealed the “fiction” of visual similarity, leading her to incorporate visual annotations like the equals and not-equals signs (=, ≠) and the letter “F” to signify the ideological construction of these naming practices.

Iddo Better Pocker’s “Behind the Curtain: Tracing Hitchcock’s Hidden Fingerprints in Jerusalem” traces the forensic traces of a 1966 state-sponsored propaganda film documenting Alfred Hitchcock’s visit to Israel. Through split screens, rotoscoping, and sound manipulation, the video pairs the documentary with Hitchcock’s Cold War thriller Torn Curtain from that same year, resulting in an audiovisual manipulation that reframes the staged encounter between Hitchcock and then-Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek. Better Pocker expands on what was merely a “marginal footnote” from his dissertation to explore how audiovisual creations, whether fictional, “factual,” or videographic, can actively shape the reality they represent through the intertwining of fact and fantasy.

Eva Álvarez-Vázquez’s “Ruin and Revolution: Beyond Deindustrialization and The Politics of Extractivism” examines Spanish deindustrialization through a tripartite structure that connects labor struggles to queer futurity. The video moves from the binary of “ruin or revolution” to a conjunctive “ruin and revolution,” utilizing split-screen montage and rhythmic electronic music (Bakalao) to suggest that ruins are rhizomatic nodes of memory and alternative possibilities. The work emphasizes how embodied performance and “temporal layering” allow for a critical reflection on the “mismatch with modernity” in peripheral Spanish regions.

Benedetta Andreasi’s “Phenomenology of Marco Damilano” considers how an Italian talk show mediates humanitarian crises through “reassuring televisual forms.” The piece utilizes a playful, “fangirl”-inflected voiceover to contrast the host’s composed professionalism with the stark realities of the Gaza war and global migration. Andreasi’s intent here is to destabilize the “sanitized order” of television news by taking apart its narrative and formal elements, eventually concluding with a minute of silence that forces a direct, “unmediated” encounter with news footage of protestors and refugees.

Carol Pinzón-Masmela’s “El Gesto” asks us to consider the 70-year Colombian armed conflict through the body as an archive. By slowing down, repeating, and fragmenting physical gestures—such as a signature or a sharp intake of breath—during the 2016 Peace Agreement ceremony, the video seeks to reveal “gestural scars” that escape spoken language. Pinzón-Masmela’s piece argues for an understanding of conflict as embodied politics, using the “imagistic” to grasp affective dimensions of human experience.

Yasaman Baghban’s “Reframing a Revolution: Historicizing an Essay Film” applies Fredric Jameson’s principle of “historicization” to the docufiction Radiograph of a Family (Firouzeh Khosrovani, 2020). The video essay remixes the essay film by removing the original voiceover and placing family photographs into a “triptych album layout” over footage of the filmmaker’s childhood home. Baghban’s work and written statement identify patriarchy as the “absent cause” linking personal family memory to the ideological contradictions of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Across these pieces, a shared dynamism emerges, shaped as much by the formal constraints of the exercises as by the collaborative conditions of the workshop itself. Participants brought with them research projects, disciplinary training, regional expertise, and primary materials that, on the surface, appeared to have little in common. Representing eight academic institutions from across the world, working on media in as many languages, and departing from as many fields of study, the cohort produced radically different responses to each of the exercises, culminating in final projects that are equally diverse in form, method, disciplinary background, and subject matter. And yet, across this diversity, there are clear resonances. Many of the works respond, often directly, to the social, cultural, generational, and geopolitical conditions of the present in which they were made, revealing concerns that extend beyond any single project to speak videographically across the collection as a whole. Deep concerns about human rights, global crisis, displacement, historical violence, and conflicts past and present surface repeatedly, not only in the subjects and media the participants chose to engage with, but in the dynamic formal strategies informed by videographic thinking. The precarity that marks many of these emerging scholars, and, more broadly, the generations to which they belong, finds expression in a range of videographic forms: through juxtaposition and erasure, through repetition and fragmentation, through the shifting, dynamic, and catalytic relationships between time-based words, images, and sounds.