Call For Conference Submissions: Home Frames: Documentary and the Domestic Space 

June 16th- 17th 2026  

 Hosted by the Centre for Documentary Research at Queen’s University Belfast.  

This conference will be held in conjunction with Docs Ireland International Documentary Film Festival 2026 (16th to 21st of June, 2026). All accepted delegates will receive a full pass to Docs Ireland screenings, panel discussions, and other events.  

Keynote Speakers:  

Professor Laura Rascaroli (University College Cork)

Mark Cousins (Honorary Professor in Film Studies, Queen’s University Belfast) 

Deadline for Abstracts: March 1st, 2026  

The domestic space has long occupied a peculiar position within documentary cinema. At once intimate and ordinary, private and politically charged, the home has served as a site of testimony, observation, performance, labour, and memory. From early observational documentaries to autobiographical and essayistic forms, from television documentary to contemporary hybrid and digital practices, domestic space has functioned not merely as a backdrop but as a structuring environment through which knowledge about class, society and identity are produced. 

This conference invites scholars and practitioners to explore the relationship between documentary filmmaking and domestic space, understood as a material, social, and representational site shaped by historical, economic, and cultural forces. Rather than treating the home as a neutral setting, the conference foregrounds domestic space as an active and timely agent in documentary form: one that conditions modes of address, ethical relations, production practices, and spectatorship. 

Domestic spaces are entangled with questions of care, gendered labour, class, migration, precarity, and everyday life. They are also increasingly central to contemporary documentary production, particularly in contexts marked by limited resources, self-filming practices, platform circulation, and post-pandemic reconfigurations of screen work. Documentary engagements with the home invite reflection on proximity and distance, visibility and concealment, and the politics of filming intimate environments. 

The conference welcomes contributions that examine domestic space across documentary history and practice, including (but not limited to) the following themes: 

– Documentary filmmaking in and about domestic interiors 

– The home as a site of intimacy, testimony, and ethical negotiation 

– home in autobiographical, first-person, and essayistic documentary practices 

– Domestic labour, care, and gendered spaces in documentary cinema 

– Housing, class, and social inequality in documentary production 

– The politics of access, consent, and filming private space 

– Archival, amateur, and home-movie practices in documentary contexts 

– Documentary production under conditions of constraint: self-shooting, low-budget, and domestic infrastructures 

– Television documentary, observational traditions, and everyday life 

– Platform documentary, streaming, and the reconfiguration of domestic spectatorship 

– Practice-as-research approaches to documentary and domestic space 

– Transnational and diasporic homes in documentary narratives 

– Housing crisis and documentary practice. 

This conference aims to bring together theoretical, historical, industrial, and practice-based perspectives, fostering dialogue between film and media studies, documentary studies, screen industries research, and creative practice. 

Conference Fee: £100 Salaried/ £70 Students

We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers, short films or media, practice-based presentations or pre-constituted panels.

A 200-word abstract alongside a 100-word biography and/or any questions should be submitted by emailing: 

documentaryresearch@qub.ac.uk  

Applicants will be notified about the decision of the Conference Committee by the 27th of April, 2026