How (some) Films do Social Theory

Speaker: Professor Kate Nash, Yale University
Series: Sociology Seminar Series

Abstract:

What if texts were not the only way to theorise? What if films also did something like social theory, but in a different way? As an extended example to consider, I will present a close reading of Alfonso Cuaron’s celebrated film Roma (2018). A memoir of a kind (famously Netflix gave Cuaron an unlimited budget to recreate his childhood home and neighbourhood) which the director has described as ‘a ghost from the future visiting the past’, it could also be seen as a docudrama about maids in Mexico City in the 1970s. Here we will look at Roma differently, as a meditation on power, violence, and compliance. What does the film contribute to our understanding of these concepts, and how does it show us the relationships between them?

Speaker biography:

Kate Nash is Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology, LSE. Previously Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, she has also been Visiting Professor at Sciences Po, Paris, the New School for Social Research, New York, Stockholm University and the UN University for Peace, San José, Costa Rica. She is a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, and a member of the editorial board of Cultural Sociology. She has published on film and human rights in Public Culture and Human Rights Quarterly. Her current research project is ‘Social Theory through Film’.