Research & Writing
I write about the changing relationship between film practice, teaching, and technology: from practice-based research and curriculum design to AI-enabled creative workflows and questions of method, authorship, and ethics.
Doctoral research
My doctoral research addresses systemic reform of practice-based film and media education in the UK. The central inquiry concerns the structural disconnection between what film schools produce and what the industry requires, and more fundamentally, what that disconnect reveals about the epistemological assumptions built into how film education is designed.
The epistemological framework draws on critical realism (Bhaskar, Archer) combined with practitioner realism (Schön). Key influences include Frayling’s distinction between research into, through, and for practice; Haseman’s practitioner research; and Nelson’s practice-as-research framework.
The methodology is The Prototype Institution, a deliberate choice to build the research site rather than observe it from a distance. The independent film education venture I am developing is simultaneously the object of study and the method of inquiry. It tests propositions about longitudinal learning frameworks, skills portfolios, and the industry-education interface in real conditions.
Expected completion: 2029. Practice-based outputs from this research are REF-eligible.
Publications
Book chapter · REF-eligible · Routledge
In Handbook on Arab Cinema, Routledge (2024). Examines how Arab filmmakers negotiate questions of cultural identity, representation, and creative constraint within and against dominant cinematic traditions.
Book (in progress)
A practitioner-facing guide moving through the full production arc: development, pre-production, production, post, and distribution, examining where AI tools serve filmmaking and where they introduce creative, ethical, or authorial risk. Strong fiction/nonfiction distinction throughout. Each chapter includes a Filmmaker’s Toolkit and an Ethics Checkpoint panel.
From Substack
Published at mostafanagy.substack.com — the latest articles are below.
Research interests
The structural conditions of UK practice-based film and media education: what they enable and what they foreclose. Particular attention to assessment frameworks, modular structures, and the gap between graduate capability and industry expectation.
What generative AI tools do to questions of authorship, craft, and ethics in filmmaking practice. Careful attention to what actually changes and what stays the same, without the boosterism or the panic.
How making generates knowledge, and how that knowledge can be validated, shared, and built upon. The epistemological conditions under which practice counts as research, and the institutional requirements that follow.
Diversifying the canons, critical traditions, and practitioner models that structure film education. Curriculum design as the primary site of intervention rather than recruitment or marketing.
I welcome conversations with researchers, practitioners, and institutions working in adjacent areas. Get in touch to discuss potential collaboration.