Reclaiming Popular Documentary

"Anderson and Milliken's book is no less than a groundbreaking study. Its exclusive focus on popular documentaries digs an alternative route next to the lane of popular fiction."—Ohad Landesman, Tel Aviv University

"More and more often I encounter first-year students who arrive at college and tell me right away that they love documentaries—thanks, I believe, to the rising popularity of the form on streaming sites like Netflix. . . . They and many, many viewers are consuming just the kinds of popular documentary texts that this collection addresses."—Jennifer Malkowski, author of Dying in Full Detail: Morality and Digital Documentary

"Despite the broad epistemological influence of commercially successful documentary films in the past several decades, documentary studies has frequently overlooked popular documentaries in favor of more formally experimental works. In Reclaiming Popular Documentary, Christie Milliken and Steve Anderson have assembled a stunning roster of scholars to begin to fill this scholarly gap by taking seriously the power and problems posed by popular documentaries at a moment in which the very grounds of truth appear increasingly unstable."—Jaimie Baron, author of Reuse, Misuse, Abuse: The Ethics of Audiovisual Appropriation in the Digital Era

"Milliken and Anderson's excellent volume on "popular" documentary is both a long time coming and absolutely rooted in this moment in the history of documentary media.  The volume fills an almost shocking gap in scholarly writing on popular documentary—especially given the value documentary studies places on its connection with the political—and it does so as the stakes of shared knowledge of the world have never been higher.  Together, the chapters in this volume compellingly explore a range of documentary media forms while always interrogating what the "popular" actually entails."—Josh Malitsky, author of A Companion to Documentary Film History