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Pooja Rangan

@p8ja.bsky.social

794 Followers 198 Following

Professor of English + Film & Media at Amherst College, Author of The Documentary Audit (Columbia 2025 *coming soon*) Immediations (Duke 2017) and co-editor of Thinking with an Accent (UC Press 2023)

A brown hand holding a red book, titled The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability - Pooja Rangan.
Copies of a book nestled in a cardboard box. Description of the book cover: The title of the book (The Documentary Audit) appears in bold black text against a deep crimson background that fades to pink toward the bottom right. The book's subtitle (Listening and the Limits of Accountability) and the author's name (Pooja Rangan) appear in smaller pink letters.
The Documentary Audit Listening and the Limits of Accountability Pooja Rangan Columbia University Press Documentary films are often celebrated with aural metaphors: they give “voice” to the “voiceless” and ask the public to “listen.” But when did listening become synonymous with social justice? How exactly do documentaries train audiences to listen when they ask them to right historic wrongs or hold power to account? The Documentary Audit challenges the association of listening with accountability and charts oppositional modes of listening otherwise. Pooja Rangan develops a framework for understanding how documentary practices have, under the mantle of accountability, provided a moral cover for listening habits that are used to profile, exclude, and incarcerate. From the British Crown’s promotional films to Zoom meeting recordings, from disability-informed filmmaking in Japan to forensic efforts to expose anti-Palestinian violence in Hebron, Rangan explores how historical and contemporary practitioners have challenged and refused the lures of normative documentary listening habits in order to listen with an accent, listen in crip time, and listen like an abolitionist. Through an interdisciplinary approach that bridges documentary and sound studies while considering raciolinguistics, disability access, and legal forensics, Rangan demonstrates how the question of listening is central to the study of documentary. Far from being a neutral ethic, The Documentary Audit shows, listening creates the reality it purports to verify—with transformative political possibilities. Pooja Rangan is professor of English in film and media studies at Amherst College. She is the author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (2017) and coeditor of Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (2023). Order Online: CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU Enter Code CUP20 for 20% discount
The title of the book (The Documentary Audit) appears in bold black text against a deep crimson background that fades to pink toward the bottom right. The book's subtitle (Listening and the Limits of Accountability) and the author's name (Pooja Rangan) appear in smaller pink letters.