Dr Silke Panse

Research statement

Silke explores moving images in their human and other-than-human environments in relation to nature, ecology, animals, plants, art, film, television. Her research is transdisciplinary and engaged across continental philosophy, critical ecologies, art theory, film theory, affect theory, realisms, and materialisms. The works she discusses often have a documentary aspect to them, be these as moving images in the gallery or on television and streamed. It is the relations between art and other-than-human and human life that interest her, and why she finds documentary the most enriching in potentially being able to make these connections.

Her research used to be focussed on specific works, such as those of the documentary filmmaker and artist James Benning, about whose work she published “Men in Huts in Woods,” “Ten Skies, 13 Lakes, 15 Pools,” and “The Work of the Documentary Protagonist: The Material Labor of Aesthetics.” But her perspective has broadened in recent years to place artists and images in their wider ecological, ethical, affective, socio-cultural, and political Umwelten. For example, she considers violence and extinction to articulate the limits of relational, and to a degree also non-relational, flat ontologies in her essay “There are no Extinctions in Relations without Bodies: On the Violence of Flat Relational Ontologies.”

She has recently edited the collection Ethical Materialities in Art and Moving Images which explores ways in which the ethical and the material come together in art and life practice. The volume includes her introduction “Ethical Materialities and Material Ethicalities” as well as her chapter “Spinoza’s Affectual Ethics: Causing, not Making.”

Silke is currently working on the monograph The Bodies of Moving Images: Towards a Biodiverse Ecology of Affects with Spinoza, Deleuze and Uexküll for the Posthumanities Series of the University of Minnesota Press. Towards that book, she has presented the papers “Bodies of Natures in Bodies of Images: Deleuze’s Affects through Spinoza’s Lenses” at the 17th Deleuze & Guattari Studies conference, Konstfack, Stockholm; “Does Ecology come after Documentary, or is all Documentary Ecological?” at the Visible Evidence XXIX conference, University of Udine; “Is the Sparrow an Actant in Being Shot? The ‘Political Nature Film’ Day of the Sparrow with an Excursion into Political Ecology and Spinoza” at Visible Evidence XXVII at the Goethe University, Frankfurt; “Is the Sparrow an Actant in Being Shot? On the Violence of Latour’s Citizen-Gun Hybrids featuring The Day of the Sparrow and Spinoza” at the PARSE Artistic Research Conference at the Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg; and “Ethical Materialities against Fake Worlds: With Spinoza, Uexküll and Deleuze beyond Weinstein into the Neverseen Human Umwelten of Moving Images” at the 12th Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference, Royal Holloway College, University of London. As part of this area of research, she has also published “Der Krieg in der Black Box des Friedens: Der Tag des Spatzen mit einem Ausflug in die politische Ökologie” in the German collection Grenzfälle. Dokumentarische Praxis zwischen Film und Literatur bei Merle Kröger und Philip Scheffner.

Silke has previously edited A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television (2014) which includes her chapter “The Judging Spectator in the Image” and the co-authored introduction “Judgment between Ethics and Aesthetics.”

Publications

Edited Books & Book Sections

• Ethical Materialities in Art and Moving Images. Silke Panse, ed. (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), 304 pp. ISBN 9781350427143.
• Sub-editor of ‘Part III. Work’ in A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow, eds. (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2015), pp. 146-207. ISBN 978-0-470-67164-1.
• A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television. Silke Panse and Dennis Rothermel, eds. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) 298 pp. ISBN 9781137014177.

Articles & Chapters

• “Introduction: Ethical Materialities and Material Ethicalities” in Ethical Materialities in Art and Moving Images. Silke Panse, ed. (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), pp. 1-33. ISBN 9781350427143.
• “Spinoza’s Affectual Ethics: Causing, not Making” in Ethical Materialities in Art and Moving Images. Silke Panse, ed. (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), pp. 37-72. ISBN 9781350427143.
• “There are no Extinctions in Relations without Bodies: On the Violence of Flat Relational Ontologies” in the issue “Violence: Environment,” PARSE. Journal for Artistic Research, Issue 15 (Spring 2023). ISSN: 2002-0953.
• “Der Krieg in der Black Box des Friedens: Der Tag des Spatzen mit einem Ausflug in die politische Ökologie” in Grenzfälle. Dokumentarische Praxis zwischen Film und Literatur bei Merle Kröger und Philip Scheffner, Nicole Wolf, ed., Dokumentarfilminitiative, Positionen und Perspektiven des künstlerischen Dokumentarfilms, Band 23 (Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2021), pp.133-154. ISBN 978-3947238354.
• “The Harvest: Of Cows, Cryptocurrencies, and Machines in Images,” Docalogue, eds. Jamie Baron and Kristen Fuhs (March 2020).
• “For A Creative Theory of Documentary in the Anthropocene (And: For all the Crossings, where is the Transdisciplinarity?).” Conference presentation for Has Documentary Failed? A Doc Now! Event, 2018). Uploaded on academia.edu.
• “Men in Huts in Woods: Independence, Transcendentalism and Technology in James Benning’s Thoreau and Kaczynski Documentaries and Exhibition” in James Benning’s Environments. Politics, Ecology, Duration, Nicolaj Lübecker and Daniele Rugo, eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 95-113. ISBN 9781474417945.
• “Introduction to Work” for the section on “Work” of A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow, eds. (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2015), pp. 147-154. ISBN 978-0-470-67164-1.
• “The Work of the Documentary Protagonist: The Material Labor of Aesthetics” in A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow, eds., (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2015), pp. 155-175. ISBN 978-0-470-67164-1.
• “The Work and the Rights of the Documentary Protagonist” in Marx at the Movies: Revisiting History, Theory and Practice, Ewa Hanna Mazierska and Lars Kristensen, eds., (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 171-197. ISBN 9781137378606.
• “Judgment between Ethics and Aesthetics: An Introduction,” co-written with Dennis Rothermel, A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television, in Silke Panse and Dennis Rothermel, eds., (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 1-30. ISBN 9781137014177.
• “The Judging Spectator in the Image” in A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television, Silke Panse and Dennis Rothermel, eds. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 33-70. ISBN 9781137014177.
• “Ten Skies, 13 Lakes, 15 Pools: Structure, Immanence and Eco-aesthetics in The Swimmer and James Benning’s Land Films” in Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human, Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway, eds. (Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), pp. 37-59. ISBN 978-1-78238-226-3.
• “Land as Protagonist. An Interview with James Benning” in Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human, Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway, eds. (Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), pp. 60-70. ISBN 978-1-78238-226-3.
• “Flora,” brochure for the symposium Screening Nature: Flora, Fauna and the Moving Image I co-curated with Anat Pick, Queen Mary University, London and Whitechapel Gallery, 2013.
• “What Drawings Can Do That Films Can’t,” Blind Movies catalogue, Anna Lucas, ed. (Oxford: Ruskin School of Drawing, 2009). ISBN 978-0-9538525-7-4.
• “Collective Subjectivity in The Children of Golzow vs. Alienation in Western Interview Documentary” in Rethinking Documentary, Thomas Austin and Wilma De Jong, eds., (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008), pp. 67-81. ISBN-13: 978-0-33-5221912.
• “The Bullets confirm the Story told by the Potato:’ Materials without Motives in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” in Reading CSI: Crime Television Under the Microscope, Michael Allen, ed. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 155-168. ISBN-13: 978-1845114282.
• Subjectivity, (Self-)reflexivity and Repetition in Documentary (PhD) (includes “Werner Herzog’s Documentaries: Material Visions”), University of Kent at Canterbury, 2007.
• “The Filmmaker as Rückenfigur, Documentary as Painting: Alexandr Sokurov in Elegy of a Voyage” in Third Text, No. 78, Vol. 20, Issue 1 (January 2006), pp. 9-25. ISBN 0415 405025. ISSN 0952-8822 (Print), 1475-5297 (Online).
• “Beruf: Neonazi,” “Hartmut Bitomsky,” “Winfried and Barbara Junge,” “Eberhard Fechner” and “Alexandr Sokurov” in The Encyclopaedia of the Documentary Film, Ian Aitken, ed. (Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 2005). ISBN-13: 9781579584450.
• Review of The New Documentary: A Critical Introduction in Film Studies: An International Review, Issue 3 (Spring 2002).

Conference, Symposium, Book Launch and Screening Curation and Co-Investigation

• [Symposium Co-Curator and Member of the Steering Committee] Has Documentary Failed? A Doc Now! Event, Birkbeck Institute for Moving Images, University of London, UK, December 15, 2018.
• [Symposium Co-Curator] Ethics, Art and Moving Images symposium, University for the Creative Arts in collaboration with the Center for Critical Thought, University of Kent, and the Whitstable Biennale. The symposium was funded with by the University of the Creative Art and the Kent Law School, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, June 3, 2016.
• [Panel Curator] “Closed Worlds and International Lines of Flight,” Daughters of Chaos. 8th Deleuze Studies Conference, Konstfack University College of Arts, Craft and Design, Stockholm, Sweden, June 30, 2015.
• [Co-Investigator and Symposium Curator] Screening Nature: Life, Catastrophes and Ecosophy symposium, Queen Mary University, London, UK, for the Screening Nature Network (2013-14) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, May 9, 2014.
• [Book Launch Curator] A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television, The Showroom, London, UK, May 8, 2014.
• [Co-Investigator and Symposium Co-Curator] Screening Nature: Flora, Fauna and the Moving Image symposium, Queen Mary University, London, UK, for the Screening Nature Network (2013-14) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, May 18 and 19, 2013.
• [Co-investigator and Screenings Curator for “Water and “Leaves in the Wind”] “Flora” programme, Screening Nature Network (2013-14) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, May 18 and 19, 2013.
• [Conference and Retrospective Curator] Werner Herzog’s Cinema between the Visionary and the Documentary, Goethe Institute and Institut Français, London, UK. The conference received grant money from two separate internal university funds from the University of Kent at Canterbury as well from the British Academy, September 16-18, 2005.
• [Screenings Curator] Documentary and ethnographic videos for the Connecting Cultures symposium, University of  Kent at Canterbury, UK, 2004.

Conference, Symposium, Research and Keynote Presentations

• [Presentation] “Bodies of Natures in Bodies of Images: Deleuze’s Affects through Spinoza’s Lenses,” 17th Deleuze & Guattari Studies Conference, Konstfack University of Arts, Craft and Design, Stockholm, Sweden, June 17, 2025.
• [Presentation] “Does Ecology come after Documentary, or is all Documentary Ecological?,” Visible Evidence XXIX conference, University of Udine, Italy, September 7, 2023.
• [Presentation] “Is the Sparrow an Actant in Being Shot? The ‘Political Nature Film’ Day of the Sparrow with an Excursion into Political Ecology and Spinoza” on the panel ‘The Nonhuman: Old and New Methods in Documentary Studies’ at Visible Evidence XXVII, Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany, December 17, 2021.
• [Panel Chair] “Topographical and Elemental Poetics,” Visible Evidence XXVII, Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany, December 18, 2021.
• [Presentation] “Is the Sparrow an Actant in Being Shot? On the Violence of Latour’s Citizen-Gun Hybrids featuring Day of the Sparrow and Spinoza” as part of the “Environment’” strand of the 4th Biennial PARSE Artistic Research Conference on “Violence,” Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, November 18, 2021.
• [Presentation] “Ethical Materialities against Fake Worlds: With Spinoza, Uexküll and Deleuze beyond Weinstein into the Neverseen Human Umwelten of Moving Images,” 12th Deleuze & Guattari Studies Conference, Royal Holloway College, London, UK, July 10, 2019.
• [Symposium Co-curation and Presentation] “For A Creative Theory of Documentary in the Anthropocene (And: For all the Crossings, where is the Transdisciplinarity?)” Has Documentary Failed? A Doc Now! Event, Birkbeck Institute for Moving Images, London, UK, December 15, 2018.
• [Presentation] “The World is not out of the Woods: The Ideology of Independence and James Benning’s Two Cabins Documentary Installation” on the panel “The Ideologies of Documentary,” Visible Evidence XXIII, Bozeman State University, Montana, US, August 13, 2016.
• [Symposium Co-Curation and Presentation] “For Innocence, Against Purity,” Ethics, Art and Moving Images symposium, University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, UK, June 3, 2016.
• [Research Presentation] “James Benning’s Levee Road between Materialisms and Realisms,” Cinema Studies Research Seminar, Media Studies Department, Stockholm University, Sweden, April 21, 2016.
• [Presentation] “Documentary Protagonists as Things: Materialisms, Realisms and – Authenticity?” Visible Evidence XXII conference, University of Toronto, Canada, August 20, 2015.
• [Panel Curation and Presentation] “A Foray into the Worlds of Size and Scale: Miniatures, Umwelten and Opaque Realism” on the panel “Closed Worlds and International Lines of Flight,” Daughters of Chaos. 8th Deleuze Studies Conference, Konstfack University of Arts, Craft and Design, Stockholm, Sweden, June 30, 2015.
• [Curation and Presentation] “The Judging Spectator in the Image,” A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television book launch, The Showroom, London, UK, May 8, 2014.
• [Conference Committee Member and Presentation] “The Camera is not a Paint Brush,” Visible Evidence XX conference, Filmhuset, University of Stockholm, Sweden, August 15, 2013.
• [Panel Chair] “Biopolitics and Distributed Bodies in Documentary Media,” and “Memory, Objects and Boundaries in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light,” Visible Evidence XX, Filmhuset, University of Stockholm, Sweden.
• [Presentation] “Judgment After Kant, Deleuze and Television,” 6th Deleuze Studies conference, University of Lisbon, Portugal, July 9, 2013.
• [Symposium Co-Curation and Presentation] “Planes in the Plane of Immanence, or: Who or What Moves the Leaves” at the symposium Screening Nature. Flora, Fauna and the Moving Image, Queen Mary University, London, UK, May 18, 2013.
• [Presentation] “The Work of the Documentary Protagonist,” Marx at the Movies conference, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK, March 16, 2012.
• [Presentation] “Moving Tears Moving Images: A Critique of Judgment in Documentary Television,” Visible Evidence XVIII, Tisch School of Arts, New York University, US, August 2011.
• [Presentation] “The Work of the Documentary Protagonist: The Material Labour of Aesthetics” to fellow contributors of the Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, New York University, US, August 2011.
• [Presentation] “Towards a Sculptural Reading of Scale and Size in Film and Television: Miniature Models and Opaque Realism,” The Big Screen vs. The Small Screen, Christchurch University, Canterbury, UK, February 16, 2011.
• [Presentation] “Land Film: Subjectivities and Structure, Ecology and Economy in James Benning’s Documentaries,” Visible Evidence XVII conference, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, August 11, 2010.
• [Presentation] “Land Film: Subjectivities and Structure, Ecology and Economy in James Benning’s Documentaries,” 3rd International Deleuze Studies Conference, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, July 10, 2010.
• [Presentation] “On the Dominance of Experience,” Documentary Now! conference, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK, January 17, 2010.
• [Presentation] “On the Dominance of Experience,” Visible Evidence XVI conference, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, US, August 16, 2009.
• [Keynote] “Land of Science and Artness: Translation, Documentary and the Copy” at the symposium “Land of Silence and Darkness. Four Days of Talk and Action Connecting Movies, Blindness, Drawing, Perception and Neuroscience,” Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK, May 14, 2008.
• [Presentation] “Collective Subjectivity in The Children of Golzow vs. Alienation in Western Interview Documentary” on the panel Film and the GDR, Historical Materialism conference, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK, November 10, 2007.
• [Presentation] “The Bullets confirm the Story told by the Potato’: Object Subjectivity and Materials without Motives in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” at the conference Real Things: Matter, Materiality, Representation co-organized by the University of York and the University of Sussex, UK, July 2007.
• [Interview] Interviewed on The Cinema Show, BBC4, about Werner Herzog’s documentaries, 2006.
• [Two-Day-Conference and Retrospective Curation and Presentation] “Between the Visionary and the Documentary: Self-reflexivity and Physicality in Werner Herzog’s Documentaries” at the conference Werner Herzog’s Cinema between the Visionary and the Documentary, Goethe Institute, London, UK, September 16-17, 2005.
• [Presentation] “Believing in Documentary? Werner Herzog’s ‘Jesus’ as a Deleuzian Simulacrum,” The Ethics and Politics of Virtuality and Indexicality, CATH conference, University of Leeds, UK, July 2005.
• [Presentation] “How Socialist Documentary became Self-reflexive: The Children of Golzow from ‘Collective Subjectivity’ to ‘Individual Objectivity’,” Society of Cinema and Media Studies, London Institute of Education, UK, April 2, 2005.
• [Presentation] “How Socialist Documentary became Self-reflexive: The Children of Golzow from ‘Collective Subjectivity’ to ‘Individual Objectivity’,” Connecting Cultures symposium, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, April 3, 2004.
• [Presentation] “Documentary against Transparency: Alexandr Sokurov’s Elegy of a Voyage,” University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, 2002.
• [Presentation] “Autobiographical Art beyond Post-structuralism: Tracey Emin’s Life-stories and their Reception as Celebrity Biography,” Texts of Testimony: Autobiography, Life-Story Narratives and the Public Sphere conference, Liverpool John Moore University, UK, 2001.
• [Presentation] “Promiscuous Narrations: Tracey Emin between Biography and Autobiography,” Console-ing Passions: Television, Video, Feminism, New Media, University of Bristol, UK, 2001.
• [Presentation] “Promiscuous Narrations: Tracey Emin between Biography and Autobiography,” Film Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, 2001.
• [Presentation] “Artists and Models: Re-enactments and other Repetitions in Life, Art and the Jungle in the Documentaries of Werner Herzog and Tracey Emin,” Visible Evidence VIII conference, Utrecht University, UK, 2000.
• [Presentation] “Werner Herzog’s Documentaries in the Aftermath of Fiction,” Film Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, 2000.

Research supervision

Research areas

• Continental Philosophy (e.g. Spinoza and Deleuze)
• Ethical and Ecological Aesthetics
• Affects and Affections
• Relations and Non-Relations
• Independence and Autonomy
• Materialisms
• Realisms
• Documentary
• Film, Art and Media Theory

Research degree students

• Ophir Amitay (2024 - Present) [First Supervisor for PhD] “Digital Skin and the New Gaze: The Transformation of Selfhood and Embodiment in the Algorithmic Age” (Research Cluster for Ontologies, Ecologies and Ethics).
• Kasia Alexiou (2024 - Present) [First Supervisor for PhD] “War and Environment: An Artistic Intervention” (Research Cluster for Ontologies, Ecologies and Ethics).
• Pati Starzykowski (2024 – Present) [Third Supervisor for PhD] “Of Bad Seeds and Unruly Natures: Ruderality as Methodology. How Weeds Emergent Properties can inform Contemporary Socio-Spatial Practices” (Research Cluster for Ontologies, Ecologies and Ethics).
• Graham Seaton (2024 – Present) [Second Supervisor for PhD] “The Photographic Object” (Research Cluster for Ontologies, Ecologies and Ethics).
• Chantal Riekel [2016 – Present) [First Supervisor for MPhil] “Reframing German Cultural Memory at the Intersection of Family and Collective Discourses”.
• Fiona MacDonald (2015 – 2024) [First Supervisor, PhD Awarded] “Feral Participations: Exploring Art and the Creaturely Through Interspecies Practice” (Research Cluster for Ontologies, Ecologies and Ethics).