We are delighted to announce that Irene Gutiérrez Torres, has successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Reframing EU's Borderspace: Participatory Filmmaking as Placemaking.”, on the 12th of March 2026.
The thesis was developed as part of two research projects: 'Reel Borders', which was funded by the European Research Council (PI: Kevin Smets), and 'Institutional Documentary and Amateur Cinema in the Colonial Era', which was funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Government of Spain (PI: Miguel Fernández-Rodríguez Labayen).
Abstract
Irene’s dissertation is a large-scale study that examines participatory filmmaking (PF) in European border zones as both a research method and a placemaking intervention. Participatory filmmaking refers to a set of methods through which a group of people co-create their own films. In the hands of border dwellers and forced migrants, it becomes a tool for co-producing knowledge about everyday processes of exclusion and inclusion in border zones, whether at nation-state borders or within urban micro-borders.
Bridging border practices and border representations, the study rethinks how spatial imaginaries, social relations, and embodied routines shape borders in the everyday. Examined as a method, it evaluates the technological and representational affordances of participatory filmmaking alongside its ethical and political commitments, identifying key potentials and constraints for border and migration studies. Examined as a placemaking intervention, participatory filmmaking is developed as a multi-tactic placemaking comprising creative, digital, civic, and cooperative tactics that intervenes across both material (on-site) and symbolic (on-screen) borders. Empirically, the project draws on six co-designed workshops with 89 co-researchers (aged 14–69) across the Irish, Moroccan–Spanish, and Syrian–Turkish borderscapes, as well as urban micro-borders in Madrid, Vitoria-Gasteiz, and Adana, resulting in 37 short films.
The central argument is that participatory filmmaking, when mobilised by border dwellers and forced migrants, has the potential to redefine borders from below by generating counter-narratives, counter-visualities, and counter-geographies that open material and symbolic spaces of belonging and becoming.
Congratulations again to Dr. Gutiérrez Torres!