Dr Alison Kahn is a visual and museum anthropologist, filmmaker, and art practitioner whose work bridges the creative industries and academia.
She began her academic journey studying French, English, and Italian literature and visual culture, living in Paris, Marseille, and Rome before completing her MPhil and DPhil in Museum Ethnology and Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University.
Her monograph, Imperial Museum Dynasties: Papal Ethnographic Collections and Material Culture (Springer 2023), examines the Pontifical Exhibition of 1925 within the broader history of European ethnographic museums, exploring the imperial, technological, and religious agendas that shaped early twentieth-century collecting and curating practices.
Alison's research and practice explore the intersections of film, literature, digital culture, artificial intelligence, and cultural heritage. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in India, where she directed a multi-award-winning documentary on the first Zeme Naga Tribal Olympics (2021).
She founded the Oxford Documentary Film Institute and has led filmmaking and editing workshops for academics across UK and European universities for over a decade. She continues to run workshops on visual anthropology and 'digital children' with colleagues at the Anthropos India Foundation, JNU, and Indira Gandhi National Open University.
A pioneer in cross-cultural ethnographic research techniques, Alison has digitised early twentieth-century ethnographic archive films, designed digital learning systems, and created online archives and art exhibitions that connect communities to their cultural heritage. Her work has been recognised with awards from the British Film Institute, Screen South, the Scatcherd Fellowship, an AHRC-funded eBook collaboration with the University of Oxford, and National Lottery funding for cultural heritage ethnography.
Webinars
- Liminality as an Ethnographic Method in Documentary Filmmaking, (A.Kahn 2022)
- Digital Children: Ethnographic Methods to Address Essential Digital Skills, (A.Kahn 2022)
British Film Institute-Funded Digitisation of Museum Film Archives Project - Ethnographic Method in Filmmaking (2022)
- Beyond the Visible: Coding, Decoding and Recoding as Anthropological Methodology
- Research through Visuals and Media (A.Kahn 2020)
Documentaries
- Captured by Women 4-part documentary, (A.Kahn 2011):
Monograph
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Imperial Museum Dynasties in Europe: Papal Ethnographic Collections and Material Culture, Springer (2023)
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Reorientating Visual and Digital Anthropology: A Handbook of Southeast Asian Perspectives (Eds. A.Kahn and R. Zaman) forthcoming 2026
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
- Kahn, A. (2026) "Liminality, and Embodiment in the Museum: Toward a Reflexive Cultural Interface" in Reorientating Visual and Digital Anthropology (Eds. A.Kahn and R. Zaman) forthcoming Routledge 2026
- Kahn, A (2025) forthcoming Abducted Semantics: How Large Language Models Appropriate and Attenuate Human Intelligence—A Geertzian Analysis (Human)
- Kahn, A (2024) “A Short Introduction to Visual and Museum Anthropological Methods to Teach in a Museum”, Indian Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol.3 (1), pp.15-25.
- Kahn, A. (2023). "Imagining Children’s Realities in Films: Visual Anthropological Approaches", The Oxford Handbook of Mental Health and Aesthetics. Hardback available from January 2025.
- Kahn, A. (2022). "We Went to Film: The Zeme Documentary Experience", Indian Journal of Anthropological Research, 1(2).
- Kahn, A. et al (2021): “Conversation pieces from Naga material culture: How digital technologies might reinvigorate the social lives of objects”, in Materiality and Visuality in Northeast India, eds. Nongbri and Tilput, (Springer. 2021)
- Kahn, A (June 2017): “Challenges and Opportunities in Teaching Documentary Film in Universities in the UK.” Keynote paper in the Journal of Media and Communication: University of Zhejiang, Hangzhou, China [Translated into Chinese]
- Troiani, I and Kahn, A (2016) “Film as Architectural Theory”, Journal of Architecture and Culture, 4(3): 485-498, DOI:10.1080/20507828.2015.1094228
- Troiani, I and Kahn, A (2016) “Beyond the Academic Book: New Undisciplined Corporeal Publication”, Journal of Architecture and Culture, 4(1): 51-71, DOI: 10.1080/20507828.2015.109422
- Ursula Graham Bower: Pathways through her Archive, Moving by Design Press (Vol. I & II, 2014). iBooks
Artist, Writer, Tennis Coach, Documentary Fimmaker