Documentary's Expanded Fields

Documentary's Expanded Fields is one of the most impressive theory monographs I've read in the past ten years and I expect that scholars in documentary studies will be citing this book for a long time. Kim's book would be appropriate to assign in graduate-level courses in Documentary Studies or New Media topics, as it will slot easily into curricula focused on histories of documentary film or theory given its robust contextualization of contemporary practices...Each chapter is theoretically rigorous and filled with examples of post-2000 work to help parse concepts, ethical orientations and typologies of the field under question. The organization is clear and argument compelling at every turn, building on ideas and frameworks rather than tearing down. * Studies in Documentary Film * By decentering documentary film, Kim makes room for a nuanced study of cinema-adjacent works and new-media projects. It is admirable work to bring these documentaries into contact with documentary film studies, while also drawing on other fields of scholarship. Kim's book yields greater value and knowledge than those who would police the boundaries with tired arguments about what is and isn't a documentary. * Film Quarterly * This daring yet meticulously argued book creates a new map of documentary ecologies in the 21st century as it travels through a dizzying array of technologies, locations, formats, practices, experiences, and politics. These new, field-defying works push aside 'flattie' feature film analog documentaries. This remarkable, eye-opening, methodology-shifting book unfolds as both expanding and expansive. It insists that these new documentary ecologies demand new thinking, new theories, new analysis, and an much more capacious and unrestrained cartography. * Patricia R. Zimmermann, Charles A. Dana Professor of Screen Studies, Ithaca College *