Project Director: Morgan Adamson, Media and Cultural Studies
Part of our 2021/2022 DLA Faculty Fellows Cohort

I am developing an artistic and digital humanities research project that examines the complicated history of the use of stadiums in times of war and other humanitarian crises. The title of this project, “Stadium: A Multi-Platform Documentary,” reflects the non-traditional nature of this documentary project, which is web-based and interactive. The goal of this project is to creatively interrogate the history of stadiums as unique architectural sites that have served to manage populations in extraordinary times. Tracing the colonial origins of this practice, I reflect on the use of stadiums in the contemporary crises of war, climate change, and pandemic. “Stadium” intends to engage a diverse audience in an examination of public architecture and urban space. Specifically, the main form that this project will take is a web documentary that allows viewers to interact with this complex history across a wide range of geographical contexts, while implementing the tools of documentary storytelling—including filmed and found footage, archival photographs and other material, interviews, and motion graphics (animation), and sound—in a rich digital environment. Web-based documentary is a relatively nascent field of documentary cinema, one that uses the resources of documentary filmmaking to generate non-linear digital narratives. Because of their fidelity to the tradition of documentary, web documentaries depart from both journalism and more traditional digital humanities in that they foreground aesthetic practices and narrative form.  Since starting this project in 2019, I have conducted research at field sites in France, to explore the use of stadiums as sites of confinement during the Algerian War, Greece, to look at the use of an Olympic stadium as a holding site for Syrian refugees, and Bisbee, Arizona, where striking miners were held in a baseball stadium in the 1917 before being deported. This year, I am visiting Chile, to look at the use of stadiums as prisons during Pinochet’s regime, and Mexico, to research the ways stadiums have been employed to house Central American migrants in recent years. As a DLA Faculty Fellow, I will develop the material I have gathered into a web documentary.