Visiting Fellow Professor Roger Canals, University of Barcelona 

In the last week of January, we welcomed DISC second international Visiting Fellow of 2025-26, Prof Roger Canals from University of Barcelona, and had a rare pleasure to discuss his work as a visual anthropologist and to be the first ones to see the rough cut of his new film on misinformation, technology, and visual trust.

In the first session, Roger presented the key principles and preliminary findings of the ERC project, ‘Visual Trust’. Reliability, accountability and forgery in scientific, religious and social images (2021-2027, PI: Roger Canals). This comparative project aims to investigate, through visual and experimental methods, how individuals from different socio-cultural milieus relate to and through images in terms of trust and mistrust. The project brings together a variety of images, including photojournalistic pictures, digital fakes, religious icons, AI-generated images, astronomical images and medical imaging.

In the second session, Roger shared theoretical and methodological reflections on how to conduct experimental research cinema about “visual trust”. To do so, he introduced the principle of “studying images through images” and the importance of critically connecting theoretical approaches with practical, aesthetic, and ethical choices. We were delighted to host the avant premier of the on-going film ‘A Matter of Facts’, that Roger co-directed with the anthropologist and filmmaker Mihai Andrei Leaha. This film explores how visual disinformation works in contexts of electoral processes marked by logics of polarisation and of raise of the extreme right, focusing on cases in Brazil and Romania.