AFfacts · Emotions and bodies in fact-based media production: Integrating affective and embodied knowledge into journalism and documentary filmmaking

Fact-based media production such as journalism and documentary filmmaking depend on truthfulness, reliability, and accuracy. Traditionally, their epistemologies set objectivity, rationality, and mind against subjectivity, emotionality, and bodily experience. Recently, media studies have seen an emotional turn: a rapid increase in scholarly attention to the role of emotions, affect, and bodily sensations in media production, content, and consumption. Yet, the epistemic value of emotions and bodies – how they limit and enable what media professionals know – is yet to be seriously considered. Furthermore, the rational/emotional dichotomy mindset has contributed to a professional culture that suppresses feelings, leaving media industries unable to adequately respond to emotion-related challenges of media labour, such as media professionals’ mental well-being or the disconnect between media and their audiences. This project’s vision is to empirically (O1), theoretically (O2), and practically (O3) integrate emotions as embodied knowledge in fact-based media epistemologies. Based on ethnographic research among media professionals working in three production “nodes” – journalism and documentary filmmaking about politics, conflicts, and culture, located in six Central-Eastern European countries – the project first seeks to understand the epistemic value of emotions and bodily experiences in journalism and documentary filmmaking. Second, the project aims to comprehensively theorize the epistemic value of emotions and bodies in fact-based media production by developing and elaborating the concepts of affective epistemology and the epistemic affordances of emotions. Third, the project experiments with a series of nature retreats for media professionals, to test whether and how ecotherapy can enhance journalists’ and documentary filmmakers’ emotional literacy and mental well-being and help practically integrate emotions and bodily experiences into fact-based media production.