Ryan Watson is a film and media scholar interested in global documentary practices, civic media activism, and the uses of new and emerging media technologies. He is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and serves as the Chair of the Department of Arts, Film, and Music and Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) at Misericordia University in Dallas, PA.

Watson’s research focuses on the efficacy, instrumentalization, and radical use of global documentary practices, particularly in places of occupation, war, and human rights abuses produced by amateurs, artists, and activists. He is also interested in how such practices intersect with the use of new and emerging representational media technologies. The basic question that guides his work is: what can documentary media, working within a range of ecologies, do to effect radical, positive changes in the world and the material lives of its inhabitants? His book, Radical Documentary and Global Crises: Militant Evidence in the Digital Age (Indiana University Press, 2021) explores many of these topics and questions, centering the discussion on amateur, artist, and activist produced documentary media in areas of extreme conflicts, such as the Iraq War, the occupation of Palestine, the war in Syria, mass incarceration in the United States, and child soldier conscription in the Congo.

In 2019, he co-edited a special issue of Studies in Documentary Film on "Radical Documentary in the Globalized Age of New Media." His writing has been published in Afterimage, Animation Journal, Cinema Journal, Critical Inquiry, Feminist Media Studies, InVisible Culture, Media, Culture & Society, Journal of Film and Video, Review of Middle East Studies, Studies in Documentary Film, and The Velvet Light Trap.  In 2022, Watson won Misericordia University’s Louis and Barbara Alesi Excellence in Scholarship Award.

Watson teaches widely in film and media studies, including recent undergraduate courses in Critical Media Studies, Global Ecocinema, Social Justice in Film & New Media, Documentary Film: Medicine, Health, and Science, Introduction to Film Studies, Global Contemporary Cinema, Documentary Film & Video, Art and Activism, American Independent Cinema, and the digital production course Introduction to Sound, Image, and Motion.