Evans-Pritchard Lectures 2027 - Lecture 4: Film / Doubt - with Bremen Donovan
Lecture 4: Film / Doubt
Evans Pritchard Lectures 2026-27
Nomi Dave: Big Mouth: Sound, Law, and Sexual Justice
The last lecture in the series will be co-presented with my colleague, the anthropologist and filmmaker Bremen Donovan, with whom I am producing a film related to this research. We will explore the role of doubt and ambiguity in the film and consider how film operates as a means of testimony, if not of truth. We will also consider how, as filmmakers and anthropologists, we must attempt to balance our support for our research collaborators with our recognition of the existence of doubt and incomplete evidence in any given claim.
About the series
This lecture series, Big Mouth, considers sound, listening, and media in relation to sexual justice. Exploring a series of legal cases in Conakry, Guinea, it asks how testimony is voiced, silenced, heard, and amplified in the production of evidence, in the courtroom and beyond. Each lecture is framed around an audiovisual mode and a socio-legal concept, showing how informal testimony re-orients the legal within a broader pursuit of justice. Big Mouth involves a research collaboration with the filmmaker Bremen Donovan and the journalist Moussa Yéro Bah, including a forthcoming book and an experimental documentary film directed by Bremen.
Nomi Dave is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Music at Oxford University and Henfrey Fellow and Tutor in Music, St Catherine’s College, Oxford. She is a trained lawyer, and holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology and DPhil in Music from Oxford. She is the author of The Revolution’s Echoes: Music, Politics and Pleasure in Guinea, for which she received the Ruth Stone Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. She founded and co-directed the Sound Justice Lab at the University of Virginia. She will be delivering a series of lectures on her new forthcoming book, Big Mouth: Sound, Law and Sexual Justice (University of Chicago Press).
