THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Cinema is a great leveller. It was this realisation that has made Wesley Shrum, a professor of sociology at Louisiana State University, USA, to take up filmmaking as a means to further the understanding of social science. “Social science, as it is understood now, is highly academic and has low public engagement,” Mr Shrum said during a talk on 'Ethnografilm: What, Why & How' at Alliance Francaise here on Monday. It was this elitist existence of the science that led to calls for public sociology.
“When I would do presentations at professional meetings on my research on scientific networks in Africa and Asia, I sometimes felt that people weren’t fully getting it. I mean they understood — you can present numbers, you can present a table — but it doesn’t always sink in,” he said. Shrum feels academicians should take to making movies.
“They are reluctant to take up movies as it does not given them credit like a research paper does,” Shrum said. As a solution, Shrum said that movies should be peer-reviewed like research papers. The idea of movies as a way of getting a socio-political message across to the masses struck him when he got entangled in a student riot in Nairobi, Kenya. “We had tear gas coming through the window, and my friend, who had been an actor in Hollywood, said, “Wow, this is so visual… have you ever thought about getting a camera?,” Shrum said.
