Decolonising and depatriarchalising research cultures: a conversation with RAMA, the transnational Latin American women’s audiovisual research network

Conference panels allow for free-flowing conversation with panellists and the audience. They lead to insights that come through thinking together with people that can bring complementary knowledge to the discussion. Yet these exchanges can also be ephemeral with ideas evaporating as we engage with the next paper or panel discussion. We address this in a search for a lasting contribution to debates in this write up of a panel on women and cinema, for the conference ‘Women and Cinema in Ibero-America: Politics, Histories, Representations, Intersectionality’, at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in September 2022. We agreed that the topics and the discussion at our panel were of broad interest and provide food for thought for academics wanting to adopt a decolonial feminist approach. Topics that we discussed included, how to approach archival research in women’s film and video, and how to ‘depatriarchalise’ the archives, and democratise access to them, as fundamental to offering a feminist perspective in archival research; how to challenge a Western androcentric paradigm and auteurist perspectives that too often erase women’s contribution to film cultures; and, how to challenge epistemological barriers that deny women creators voices. In addition, the panel presented a first-hand perspective of eurocentrism and the experience of European academia for a researcher from Brazil and discuss how a decolonial feminist film curator/programmer can be a gate-opener rather than a gate-keeper.