Utila, Honduras, relies heavily on its tourism industry, and the island’s tropicalised representations circulate prominently in both national and international tourism media. In the promotion of Utila as a scuba diver’s paradise, its positioning within Honduras is obfuscated in such ephemera, while both physical and image-based space alterations perpetuate colonial continuities, silencing, and violent erasure of particular peoples, spaces, and species. By working closely with human rights activists and diverse communities, as well as paying attention to positionality and multiple narratives, the project showed how local effects in Utila are imbricated within national government corruption, Indigenous land rights struggles, and international flows of capital and ‘development’.
The PhD between Film and Human Geography (Victoria University of Wellington) culminated in the production of a 100,000 word written exegesis and a feature-length documentary film. Both the thesis and film adopted a transformative research paradigm informed by intersectional feminist epistemology and a range of mixed methods approaches including: qualitative semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observation and field notes, and discourse analysis of over 400 items. By engaging with innovative media forms and participatory praxis, the aim of the research was to enable alternative representations of the island and provoke advocacy and improved social and environmental outcomes on the island.
In 2015, the Museo Para La Identidad Nacional (MIN – Museum for National Identity) in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, selected the project for a solo month-long photography exhibition. The exhibit included 54 large-scale photographs and a ten-minute multimedia essay, expanding the project’s reach into community spaces. I received a Canada Arts Council grant to attend its inauguration.
The work originated as my Master of Fine Arts (Documentary Media) research project at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, which I completed in 2011. In 2015, I started my PhD in Film with Human Geography at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and returned to Utila in 2016 to complete my PhD fieldwork. Between 2010 – 2016, I spent 3 years in total living on the island, on-and-off. During this time, I have been involved in a number of community outreach projects and have promulgated various aspects of this research within Honduras and internationally. These include: a month-long solo photography exhibition at MIN; multiple screenings of In the Land of the Swamper (and its translation into Spanish, En La Tierra Del Swamper – 2013), a short documentary film which has won international film awards and been used for educational purposes locally; a series of academic and popular media articles; and multiple conference presentations.
