Emerging relationships and diverse motivations and benefits in participatory video with young people

Abstract

The paper reflects on the process of participatory video production with young people from a deprived neighbourhood in Bratislava. We draw on Kindon's [2003. Participatory video in geographic research: a feminist practice of looking? Area, 35 (2), 142–153] and Parr's [2007. Collaborative film-making as process, method and text in mental health research. Cultural geographies, 14 (1), 114–138] arguments that the process of participatory video can bear more significance for all actors of the video than the video-as-a-product. The paper thus explores relationships between particular groups of actors (young participants, the researcher and the practitioner) as well as among them, in the video-making process. We are especially interested in the diversity of motivations behind different actors’ decisions to be involved in participatory video, and we explore the dynamic changes of such motivations and the range of ultimate benefits that participatory video provided. These insights in turn help us to understand multiple types and layers of knowledge produced by young people through participatory video. We conclude the paper by highlighting the intersubjective diversity of participatory video, and we suggest how this can be approached to make participatory video research transformative and efficient for the purpose of research at the same time.