A Conversation with David MacDougall: Reflections on the Childhood and Modernity Workshop Films

This interview with ethnographic filmmaker and theorist David MacDougall focuses on his most recent collaborative research project: an ongoing, five‐year enterprise entitled Childhood and Modernity: Indian Children's Perspectives. In the project, which emerged from his earlier work documenting the social worlds and experiences of children in diverse institutions across India, MacDougall directs a series of workshops that equip small cohorts of boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 13 with basic video skills. These young, first‐time filmmakers produce short films based on their investigation of research topics they select and design themselves. The process recognizes and amplifies the perspectives of children at a time of transformation and change in India. In a conversation with filmmaker Rowena Potts, a doctoral student in cultural anthropology at New York University and facilitator of a Childhood and Modernity workshop in Kolkata, MacDougall describes the evolution and contours of this project and its implications for ethnographic film, visual anthropology, and global studies of childhood.