Documentary Arts and Ethnographic Research Graduate Certificate

The graduate certificate in Documentary Arts and Ethnographic Research is a 12-credit interdisciplinary program that involves faculty and courses in the Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication. The certificate builds on Temple’s strong international reputation in documentary film and visual anthropology. It is ideally suited for students who plan to incorporate visual studies, ethnographic methods and documentary practices into their artistic and scholarly projects. The certificate program offers students the opportunity to develop marketable applied expertise in practices that bridge the arts, humanities and social sciences.

The philosophy behind the certificate program is to promote a broad and critical use of diverse media tools in the study and representation of culture(s). Program topics include the theories, methods, aesthetics and ethics of documentary research and visual representation; the relationships between artistic, humanistic and scientific visual research methods; the collaborative use of visual media in indigenous, diaspora and non-Western communities; the critical understanding of the use of new media in documentary contexts, such as mobile media; and the political economy that shapes how images are made, distributed and used worldwide.