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.

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We Don't Need a Map opens with a provocation. "G'day Australia. How you goin'?" Australian Aboriginal cinematographer, filmmaker, and artist Warwick Thornton asks, in voiceover. We hear children singing the national anthem and see an inky black cosmos pierced by tiny, racing splinters of light. These could be stars, we realize, if we were traveling through space at a great speed. "We are standing here with our chest out, wrapped in the Australian flag and the Southern Cross," Thornton muses. He is referring to the most distinctive constellation in the Southern Hemisphere, also a feature of the national flag. It is a symbol that has recently been co-opted in the service of a xenophobic nationalism in Australia. "Are we a monoculture with a potato up our bum? Are we worried that someday someone's gonna steal our barbecues and beer?" Thornton's tone is irreverent, his language idiomatic, and he is speaking to a non-Indigenous Australian audience. A feverish title sequence follows, rapid cuts propelled by the tempo of punk rock. Backlit shots of metal figurines, including a horse and rider rearing over the camera, are played at dizzying speed. Light trails from traffic, and landscapes in time-lapse are juxtaposed with handheld shots of the Southern Cross on flags, on bumper stickers, and tattooed on a man's pale shoulder. Thunder claps, sparks fly, and dogs growl. The result is unsettling: things are out of balance; something is not right. The final two images are of a small Aboriginal child sitting in a canoe, crying with rage, and two metal dingoes, animated by an invisible puppeteer (Thornton, as the film will soon make clear), fighting on the sand.

In this dialogue, I speak with distinguished Australian photographer Juno Gemes about a retrospective collection of her work that she is in the process of compiling at her studio on the banks of the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. Provisionally titled Something Personal: Chronicles of the Movement 1978–2022, it will include photographs produced during a long‐term collaboration between Gemes and her friend Frances Peters‐Little, a Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay filmmaker and historian with whom I also spoke for this dialogue. Combined, these conversations provide insight into the social relations, protocols, and ethics that shape and inform Gemes' ongoing photographic practice.