We are happy to share that on Thursday, 12 March 2026, at 15:00, Irene Gutiérrez-Torres will defend her PhD dissertation at the Learning Theatre on the ground floor of the LIC Brussels Center.
Title: Reframing Europe’s Borderscape: Participatory Filmmaking as Placemaking
Abstract:
Irene’s dissertation is a large-scale study that examines participatory filmmaking (PF) in European border zones as both a research method and a placemaking intervention. Participatory filmmaking refers to a set of methods through which a group of people co-create their own films. In the hands of border dwellers and forced migrants, it becomes a tool for co-producing knowledge about everyday processes of exclusion and inclusion in border zones, whether at nation-state borders or within urban micro-borders.
Bridging border practices and border representations, the study rethinks how spatial imaginaries, social relations, and embodied routines shape borders in the everyday. Examined as a method, it evaluates the technological and representational affordances of participatory filmmaking alongside its ethical and political commitments, identifying key potentials and constraints for border and migration studies. Examined as a placemaking intervention, participatory filmmaking is developed as a multi-tactic placemaking comprising creative, digital, civic, and cooperative tactics that intervenes across both material (on-site) and symbolic (on-screen) borders. Empirically, the project draws on six co-designed workshops with 89 co-researchers (aged 14–69) across the Irish, Moroccan–Spanish, and Syrian–Turkish borderscapes, as well as urban micro-borders in Madrid, Vitoria-Gasteiz, and Adana, resulting in 37 short films.
The central argument is that participatory filmmaking, when mobilised by border dwellers and forced migrants, has the potential to redefine borders from below by generating counter-narratives, counter-visualities, and counter-geographies that open material and symbolic spaces of belonging and becoming.
The thesis was developed as part of two research projects: 'Reel Borders', which was funded by the European Research Council (PI: Kevin Smets), and 'Institutional Documentary and Amateur Cinema in the Colonial Era', which was funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Government of Spain (PI: Miguel Fernández-Rodríguez Labayen).
Screening note: On the evening before the defence, on 11 March at 18:00, the PhD candidate will present a screening at the Learning Theatre on the ground floor of the LIC Brussels Center, showing some of the films produced during her thesis. Click on the following link for more info and registration for the film screening.