Working Papers | June 2025

Working Papers

Paper 1: “‘I’ve Been Bound By It’: Representing Capitalist Enclosures in the Black Rust Belt” — Preparing for Submission

Abstract:
This paper investigates spatial and institutional forms of containment as represented in the documentary DRY BONES, set in northeast Ohio. The film follows a Black community navigating systems of enclosure shaped by capitalist institutions such as religion, organized sports, neighborhood segregation, law enforcement, and the nation-state. I argue that documentary film offers a distinctive medium for both revealing and resisting these enclosures, especially as they manifest within Black Rust Belt geographies. Drawing on Marxist theories of enclosure, Black geographies, and scholarship on spatialized racial trauma, I situate DRY BONES within broader discourses on capitalist containment and visual politics. Through close analysis of the film’s narrative and aesthetic strategies, such as cinematography, sound design, and editing, I explore how the documentary mediates forms of boundedness while also revealing moments of rupture, refusal, and liberation. Centering accounts, like one community member’s description of being “bound” by Christian doctrine, I demonstrate how DRY BONES complicates dominant representations of place, identity, and mobility in the rust belt region of Ohio. Ultimately, I contend that place-based documentary, when rooted in Black storytelling and critical spatial analysis, serves as a powerful site for challenging capitalist enclosures and imagining otherwise.

Paper 2: “[Unintelligible]: Capturing Disordered Voice in Documentary Film” — Preparing for Submission

Abstract:
This article examines the aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological significance of the unintelligible voice in documentary film. Through autoethnographic reflection and practice-based analysis, I explore how disordered or non-normative speech, particularly impacted by disability, disrupts conventional frameworks of subtitling, legibility, and representation in nonfiction media. Focusing on Ike Maxwell, a central figure in DRY BONES whose voice is marked by disordered speech, I argue that unintelligibility should not be treated as a communicative failure, but as a generative site of meaning-making. Building on Stefanie K. Dunning’s concept of the “Black Weird” and Pooja Rangan’s theorization of the autistic voice in Immediations (2017), I explore the idea of a “third voice” that resists binary forms of dominant systems and systemic forces. This third voice, often dismissed as incoherent, invites alternative modes of knowing, relating, and witnessing through film. By positioning this work within emerging fields such as disability media studies and connecting it to documentary and literary genre theory, this paper calls for a broader reimagining of cinematic voice that embraces opacity, alterity, and embodied difference.

Paper 3: “Dwelling in Model Space: Recreating Racialized Landscapes in Documentary Film” — Preparing for Submission

Abstract:
This article explores the methodological, political, and aesthetic dimensions of model-making in documentary film through the practice of “dwelling in model space.” Drawing on Black geographies and architectural studies, the article examines how constructing a miniature model of Elyria, Ohio, where the story of Ike Maxwell unfolds in DRY BONES, informed the film’s recreation of racialized landscapes. I focus on the symbolic and material processes of building small-scale representations of homes, roads, and community landmarks, including a miniature football stadium where Ike played and the local bar where his brother was killed. Made from wood, paper, and glue, these handcrafted models function as cinematic tools and memory devices for representing Black life under structural violence. Visually inspired by television and film stylistic references such as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Beetlejuice, and captured using a tube camera, these sequences offer a mediated space for reflecting on the 1975 police killing of Daryl Lee Maxwell. Drawing on scholarship on architectural miniatures (Jozwiak, 2020; Chylinski, 2022), I propose “model space” as a critical site of dwelling, remembrance, and resistance within the formalized lexicon of nonfiction filmmaking.