BOOK EVENT: THE DOCUMENTARY AUDIT

BOOK LAUNCH EVENT

Friday, September 19, 6:00–7:30 PM ET
Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway,  6th floor
Also available via Zoom

How does listening in documentary become a proxy for justice—and what other kinds of listening might be possible?

In The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability (Columbia University Press, 2025), Pooja Rangan examines how documentary listening—through habits she calls neutral, entitled, and juridical—can reinforce structures of profiling, exclusion, and carceral capture, even when framed as progressive or ethical.

This launch event brings together three respondents who take up the book’s invitation to think documentary and sound alongside raciolinguistics, disability access activism, and legal forensics:

• Lakshmi Padmanabhan (Film Scholar, Northwestern University)
• Jordan Lord (Artist and Writer, Colorado College)
• LaCharles Ward (Curator and Scholar, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)

Together, they will explore how to refuse listening habits that discipline and punish, and how to reimagine accountability across media, law, and everyday life.

Free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Please email accessibility needs related to this event to cmc673@nyu.edu before Friday, September 5, 2025.

Use coupon code CUP20 to save 20% when ordering The Documentary Audit from Columbia University Press.

SPONSORS

NYU Center for Media, Culture, and History
Columbia University Press
Amherst College
NYU Center for Disability Studies
NYU Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies

This is an in-person event, open to the public. Prior registration is required. Non-NYU attendees will receive emailed instructions for building access and may be asked to present a government-issued photo ID upon arrival. NYU attendees must present their NYU ID.

Zoom Registration

In-Person Registration

Participant Bios:

Pooja Rangan is Professor of English in Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. She is the author of the award winning books Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke UP 2017) and Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (U. California Press 2023, coedited with Akshya Saxena, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar). Rangan is currently writing a book with the filmmaker and scholar Brett Story on documentary and the making and unmaking of carceral common sense. She also edits the Investigating Visible Evidence book series at Columbia UP along with Jane Gaines, Michael Renov and Faye Ginsburg.

Lakshmi Padmanabhan is an assistant professor of Radio, TV, Film at Northwestern University. Their current book project, Documentary Degree Zero, examines realism in Indian independent documentary and the unrealized promises of decolonization from the 1970s to today. They are editor of Forms of Errantry on filmmaker Miryam Charles, with academic work in Art History, Camera Obscura, Cultural Critique, JCMS, Women & Performance, and New Review of Film and Television, and criticism in n+1, e-flux, Seen, Public Books, Jewish Currents, and Post45. A curator of experimental film and video, they have organized programs for e-flux Screening Room, DocLisboa, the Block Museum, BRIC Arts, and Magic Lantern Cinema.

Jordan Lord is a teacher, artist, filmmaker, and writer, whose work addresses the relationships between historical and emotional debts, framing and support, access and documentary. Their work has been shown at venues and festivals including MoMA, Walker Art Center, Camden International Film Festival, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, and Performance Space NY. They have presented solo exhibitions at Artists Space (New York, NY), Piper Keys (London, UK), and Squeaky Wheel (Buffalo, NY).

LaCharles Ward is Supervisory Museum Curator of Photography and Film and Director of the Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. A cultural theorist of African American photography and Black visual culture across the diaspora, his writings on photography, legal history, and Black people’s relationship to law have appeared in Black Camera, History of Photography, and museum catalogues. Formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, Ward is developing book projects on evidence law, photography, and Black life.