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The OIMDA Model: Blindness Case Study

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Documentary and Stereotypes
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Abstract

This case study is based on my own research-led documentary project on blindness, which resulted in two feature documentaries—The Terry Fragments (2019), which portrays an elderly, blind, male English painter and June’s Patchwork (2019), which portrays an elderly, blind, female English writer. The aim of this ongoing project is to deconstruct stereotypes of disability—in particular, blindness. The first stage of this research involved the identification of stereotypes that stigmatise blind people in existing factual media through OIMDA. The insights that the analysis yielded then informed strategies for suppressing stereotype activation through my own films. Given that this project is ongoing and relates to a very particular outgroup, I shall use it here only to demonstrate the application of the OIMDA model without outlining the subsequent stereotype reduction strategies, which we will discuss more generally later.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://test1.heartlandfilm.org/movies/victory-over-darkness/

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Brylla, C. (2023). The OIMDA Model: Blindness Case Study. In: Documentary and Stereotypes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26372-9_6

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