Elsa Gomis is a filmmaker and a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the Oxford Department of Politics and International Relations where she is participating to a research project entitled ‘Data Visualization and Policymaking’. This project aims to understand how visualization features in international policymaking, as well as its implication for governance, public perceptions and politics. Elsa Gomis is also affiliated with the University of East Anglia. Her Critical Ph.D by Practice in Film Studies (2021) was supported by a doctoral fellowship from the School of Art, Media and American Studies of the University of East Anglia. She was awarded a Roberto Cimetta scholarship to direct a feature film in Malta’s archipelago as part of doctoral study. Her work explores the connections between the collective imaginary of migration by the Mediterranean and today’s European lethal policies. Notion of collective imaginary is key in her research to understand the relationship between mainstream media images of refugees and contemporary border regimes. Her feature film The People Behind the Scenes has been screened in various places such as COMPAS Oxford, Maison Française of Oxford, and the Collège de France Visual Anthropology seminar. Her work as been selected for international conferences worldwide including Racialisation and the Media. From Television to Twitter at Oxford Rothermere American Institute and at the Bold New Voices in Migration Research Conference at Harvard Immigration Initiative.

Her most recent publications are entitled ‘By a Thread, the Space Left to Activism when Fashion deals with the Migration “Crisis”’ (Bloomsbury, 2022) and ‘Pistes de subversion pour dénoncer les chemins migratoires mortels en Méditerranée’, (La vie des idées, 2021). Together with Dr Perin Emel Yavuz and Dr Kahena Sanaa, Gomis is co-editor of the section ‘En Images’ of Institute Migration journal De Facto.

In 2022, a selection of Elsa Gomis’ films will be exhibited at Wolfson College. She also represents Oxford Department of Politics and International Relations at OxCo video production training program organized by the Research, Impact and Engagement team of Oxford Social Sciences Division. Elsa Gomis dedicates her time at Maison Française of Oxford to the redrafting of her doctoral dissertation for a book publication and will organise a seminar series titled New imaginaries of migrations. Considering contemporary art forms using still and moving images as a formal laboratory able to challenge mainstream images of migrations, each session of this seminar series will invite both an artist and a scholar to discuss one innovative visual strategy related to contemporary portraying of refugees.

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