Documentary Film as Collaborative Ethnography: Using a Thirdspace Lens to Explore Community and Race

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe civil rights movement in the USA offers sites of struggle for access, equality, and power related to racialised spaces. This article discusses documentary film's potential to journey into and assess this significant social movement through a Thirdspace perspective, motivated by the documentary film Tampa Technique: Rise, Demise, and Remembrance of Central Avenue and guided by a collaborative ethnographic process. Central Avenue, a primarily black-owned business district that thrived as a physical space in Tampa, Florida, until 1974, is the impetus to utilise Thirdspace. A redesigned city park, re-opened in 2016, memorialises the community to form a new racialised identity. Connecting past and present, this offers an intervening space of innovative possibility to explore hope and despair, collaboration and contestation, and the lived and imagined realities of the community. Through the documentary film, Central Avenue serves as a space to analyse civil rights locally and emerges as a symbolic battlefield of historical and social forces connected to segregation. Documentary film as visual art provides a vehicle to understand a racialised community through a collective lens of place, space, and race, and to recreate Central Avenue as a thematic thread of black life in Tampa, produced through a trialectic Thirdspace approach.