Event | Filming in European Cities: Rethinking Methodology in Film & Visual Studies – Public Lecture and Masterclass
Event | Filming in European Cities: Rethinking Methodology in Film & Visual Studies – Public Lecture and Masterclass
Date: 25 September 2025
Time: 13:00-19:00
Location: Leiden, Leiden University (venue: TBA)
Organizers: Ipek A. Celik Rappas, Maria Boletsi, Astrid Van Weyenberg
Contact & registration: m.boletsi@hum.leidenuniv.nl / a.l.b.van.weyenberg@hum.leidenuniv.nl / ipekcelik@ku.edu.tr
Registration deadline: August 31, 2025
Credits: 1 or 2 ECTS (Details below)
Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location – Public Lecture
The talk will be based on “Filming in European Cities,” a recently published book (Cornell University Press) that examines the interaction between urban transformation and the film and television industry. With the growth of digital platforms, there is a rising demand for unique and cost-effective locations for screen projects. Industry professionals constantly face challenging tasks such as transforming an old factory in Istanbul to resemble a war zone in Aleppo or finding a street in London that evokes Barcelona. 
Based on interviews with over 40 film and television workers and municipal media commission staff from four different countries, the book explores the invisible labor and the social and political dynamics behind the transformation of cities and neighborhoods into functional screen environments. While analyzing the local and global screen economy in five European media capitals — Athens, Belfast, Berlin, Istanbul, and Paris — it also reveals how this industry contributes to contemporary urban processes such as real estate transformations and dispossession.
Bio: Ipek A. Celik Rappas is an Associate Professor in Media and Visual Arts at Koç University, Istanbul. Her research explores media and marginalized communities in Europe, and the relationship between media labor, production, and space. She is also the author of In Permanent Crisis: Ethnicity in Contemporary Media and Cinema (U of Michigan, 2015).
Rethinking Methodology in Film & Visual Studies – Masterclass
This masterclass invites students to critically engage with methodological questions in film and visual studies, focusing particularly on approaches that move beyond conventional textual or narrative analysis. While textual interpretation remain vital tool, the aim here is to explore what else visual studies can do—and how it can do it—when its methods are informed by interdisciplinary crossings and embodied, political, or spatial perspectives.
Drawing from my own academic trajectory—from political science to literature, film and media studies, urban studies, and currently criminology—I will reflect on how each discipline has shaped my approach to visual material and methodological thinking. This personal-political journey will serve as an entry point for discussing alternative, hybrid, and situated methods that students may find generative in their own work.
Key themes will include:
- Methodological experimentation and interdisciplinarity
- Embodied, sensory and spatial approaches to visual culture
- Situated knowledge production in and through film and media
- Visual methods in relation to justice, spatiality, and power
This masterclass is designed for those seeking methodological alternatives—students who may feel caught between disciplines or are looking for a more politically engaged, experimental, or transdisciplinary approach to their research. We will read short methodological texts, analyze select case studies, and reflect on alternative tools of research. Students will be encouraged to bring in their own questions about method, disciplinarity, and research practice to collectively think through how methodologies can be invented rather than inherited.
Readings for masterclass
- Zlatan Krajina, Shaun Moores, and David Morley, “Non-Media Centric Media Studies: A Cross-Generational Conversation,” European Journal of Cultural Studies17, no. 6 (2014): 682–700, https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549414526.
- Dario Llinares, “A Cinema for the Ears: Imagining the Audio-Cinematic through Podcasting,” Film-Philosophy24, no.3 (2020), https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/film.2020.0149.
- Claudia Mitchell, Naydene De Lange, Relebohile Moletsane, “Part 1: Introduction,” “Part 2: Project Design,” in Participatory Visual Methodologies, Sage (2017).
- Sarah Pink, “Part 2: Sensory Ethnography in Practice,” in Doing Sensory Ethnography (second edition), Sage (2015): 71-138.
- “Podcasts give a voice to marginalized communities,” DW Akademie September 2, 2024, https://akademie.dw.com/en/podcasts-and-marginalized-communities-raising-voices-and-reclaiming-histories/a-70112428
Provisional Program
13:00-13:30 Welcome by organisers
13:30 – 15:30 Masterclass with dr. Celik-Rappas: “Rethinking Methodology in Film & Visual Studies”
15:30 – 16:30 Break
16:30 – 18:00 Book presentation & talk by Dr. Celik-Rappas: Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location
18:00 – 19:00 Small reception
Credit details
Students can obtain 1 to 2 ECs. To obtain 1 EC, they are required to read assigned chapters from the speaker’s book, Filming in European Cities, and a number of selected texts on methodology, attending both the talk and the masterclass and submitting questions on the assigned material in advance. To obtain 2 ECs, students are required to do all the above, as well as submit a brief reflection piece (ca. 1200 words) after the event.