Ram Krishna Ranjan
Doctoral Student
The Film, Photography and Literary CompositionAbout Ram Krishna Ranjan
I am a practice-based researcher and visual artist. I am currently a PhD candiadte at Valand Academy. My educational background is in Economics, Media and Cultural Studies and Fine Art. My longstanding areas of interests are decoloniality, migration, gentrification, memory and nation, and the intersectionality of caste, class, and gender. Through my moving-images based practice, I try to build conversations around place-specific issues of social, economic, and political justice.
About my PhD research
Taking the Bengal Famine of 1943 as a site-event, my practice-based research aims to further and experiment with epistemologies and ontologies of expressions that emerge from the space of subalternity and investigate the possibilities and limits of it in film practices. The main research question that underpins this research is – how do we move images (specifically filmmaking practice) towards subaltern epistemologies and ontologies? The following secondary questions situate the broader question in more specific terms: 1) how can we mobilize subalternity as both a theoretical paradigm and a methodological stance in film practices; 2) what are the ethical-political and creative challenges in undertaking such a project; 3) in what ways, while acknowledging the multiple incommensurabilities any subaltern research project produces, we can address those ethical-political and creative challenges?