Reflections on academic video

As academics we study, research and teach audiovisual media, yet rarely disseminate and mediate through it. Today, developments in production technologies have enabled academic researchers to create videos and mediate audiovisually. In academia it is taken for granted that everyone can write a text. Is it now time to assume that everyone can make a video essay? Using the online journal of academic videos Audiovisual Thinking and the videos published in it as a case study, this article seeks to reflect on the emergence and legacy of academic audiovisual dissemination. Anchoring academic video and audiovisual dissemination of knowledge in two critical traditions, documentary theory and semiotics, we will argue that academic video is in fact already present in a variety of academic disciplines, and that academic audiovisual essays are bringing trends and developments that have long been part of academic discourse to their logical conclusion.

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