Participatory Documentary Research Articles

Screening China in Carnival: A Powerful China Framed in Participatory Documentary

ABSTRACT This article contributes to research into representations of China in current China–UK co-produced transnational documentary films. It examines Chinese New Year: The Biggest Celebration on Earth (2016) from the perspective of cinematographic styles and filmmaking techniques to demonstrate how this film frames a powerful image of China through a cultural lens, based on festive traditions and folk customs. The paper draws on Bill Nichols’ theory of participatory documentary and develops the discussion via the philosophical thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin on carnival. It argues that this film provides an example of how to write the story of modern China into an attractive narrative marked by the adaptation from localisation to globalisation through the engagement of non-fiction. With the employment of a multi-line narrative structure, this film maps diverse versions of gatherings that happened across towns and cities in China, highlighting how the festival reunites families and can be understood as an expression of familial love. Through the participation of hosts, the film invites audiences to attend festive celebrations from a local viewpoint, in particular family dinners, constructing the discourse of Da Tuan Yuan (great reunion). In the portrayal of people performing folk customs, the film indicates their cultural recognition of the significance of the Spring Festival. As such, this film constructs a representation of “Powerful China” supported by the Chinese government’s promotion of Chinese cultural identity, which aims to play its part in the solidification of national identity.

Participatory wildlife films for primate conservation education in Los Tuxtlas Biosphere Reserve, Veracruz, Mexico

Abstract Audiovisual media has become an integral part of conservation education strategies, with the potential not only to communicate information but also to impact on its viewers perceptions and attitudes towards a particular subject. Despite this potential, few studies have evaluated either the use of film for primate conservation initiatives or the wider impact of participatory film production. Our study evaluates the impact of a participatory documentary film about historic human-primate coexistence in the Los Tuxtlas region, Veracruz, Mexico, to improve people’s knowledge, perception, and attitudes towards the local primate species, Alouatta palliata and Ateles geoffroyi. Our study took place in six rural localities, in four of which a participatory film-making process was undertaken, involving production workshops and public screenings; two localities were intentionally left out as control groups. People’s knowledge, perception, and attitudes towards primates were assessed through randomized sampling using a questionnaire prior (n = 419) and following (n = 223) the presentation of the documentary. Results indicate a minimal but positive shift in participant’s attitudes and perceptions, with statistically significant increases in primate knowledge scores. While the participatory approach offers promise, further exploration and refinement are essential for effective conservation education. The study highlights the need for diverse and locally based perspectives in developing conservation education materials and programs to foster meaningful engagement and drive primate conservation efforts forward.

El archivo digital de Humanizando la deportación: narrativas participativas como espacio tecnopolítico

Este artículo analiza el caso del archivo digital de Humanizando la deportación como espacio tecnopolítico a partir de la producción de documentales participativos. Analizamos la manera en que las experiencias de personas deportadas exponen la crueldad de violencias estructurales e institucionales sobre la migración y genera conocimiento situado para una comprensión cualitativa del tema. Discutimos cómo el documental participativo potencia la agencia de voces subalternas. Concluimos que esta plataforma se constituye como un espacio tecnopolítico a contrapelo del discurso oficial sobre la migración.

Home as a site of resistance: Editorial

This special issue intervenes in the scholarship on domestic space on screen by adopting a specific focus on the home as a space of resistance across different geographies and time periods, from the 1960s to today. The articles utilise a mix of research methods, from archival to participatory documentary. Considering debates from fields such as home movie studies, virtual reality, media activism, and the relationship between film and urbanism, the articles in this special issue demonstrate how film and media can address resistance centred around the concept of home. They also challenge and offer alternative views to white, heteronormative, middle-class representations of domestic life. These articles provide insights into the challenges and importance of home for marginalised groups, suggest new ways for film and media studies to approach representation, and centre the portrayal of often overlooked communities. Central to these articles is the idea of home and the use of media as a form of resistance and agency that can be used to contest mainstream perspectives. Each article looks at what home means, whether it’s a place of safety, precarity, identity, or memory, with each essay looking at how media shape or challenge our views of home and social identity.

Returning community psychology to the insights of anarchism: Fragments and prefiguration

Anarchism signifies the actions taken to bring about a fairer, more equal, non-hierarchical, and democratic society, one that exists without State coercion or domination. Although community psychology has engaged with some anarchist practices, such as mutual aid, the discipline has had little explicit or direct engagement with anarchism’s broader project of sociopolitical organization, with a notable exception. Almost fifty years ago, Seymour Sarason argued for what he called the anarchist insight, urging community psychologists to be wary of how they interact with oppressive State apparatuses that cause considerable psychological damage within communities. In this article, I draw on Sarason’s conception of the anarchist insight as an entry point into what I prefer to think of as the insights of anarchism. The insights of anarchism, I posit, are the knowledges derived from the fragments of anarchism that already exist in communities. The task of community psychologists concerned with the insights of anarchism is to work with people to communicate, strengthen, and make connections between these different fragments. Drawing from my own work, I examine how residents from a low-income community produced and screened a participatory documentary film that connected the everyday anarchism of a community garden to social movement organizing, where the role of the State was intensely debated. I conclude by considering some of the ways by which future community psychology work can consolidate the insights of anarchism.

Poetics of Refraction

Reduced to temporary guests, victims, threats, or enemies, those who are forced to seek refuge have to navigate a political minefield. To seek recognition in the public sphere is an especially treacherous endeavor under these conditions. Faced with a range of imposed identities–including the refugee label itself–the quest for “more visibility” through documentary images is fraught with contradictions for the displaced. This article considers the ways in which filmmakers and artists with experience of displacement work with documentary methods and forms in the face of these extreme difficulties. As they challenge and seek alternatives to conventional forms of documentary, a range of new expressions and tendencies can be discerned in the wake of “The European Refugee Crisis,” from so-called participatory documentary to essayistic and more experimental approaches. The article discusses, among other films, Purple Sea (2020), Midnight Traveler (2019), and My New European Life (2019).

Syrian Revolution and Participatory Documentary: Possibility of Solidarity through the Production and Dissemination of Digital Videos

Syrian Revolution and Participatory Documentary: Possibility of Solidarity through the Production and Dissemination of Digital Videos

Moving images, Moving Methods: Advancing Documentary Film for Qualitative Research

With the widespread use of digital media as a tool for documentation, creation, preservation, and sharing of audio-visual content, new strategies are required to deal with this type of “data” for research and analysis purposes. This article describes and advances the methodological process of using documentary film as a strategy for qualitative inquiry. Insights are drawn from a multimedia study that explored Inuit-caribou relationships in Labrador, Canada, through the co-production of community-based, research-oriented, participatory documentary film work. Specifically, we outline: 1) the influence of documentary film on supporting the project conceptualization and collaboration with diverse groups of people; 2) the strength of conducting filmed interviews for in-depth data collection, while recognizing how place and activities are intimately connected to participant perspectives; and 3) a new and innovative analytical approach that uses video software to examine qualitative data, keep participants connected to their knowledge, and simultaneously work toward creating high impact storytelling outputs. The flexibility and capacity of documentary film to mobilize knowledge and intentionally create research outputs for specific target audiences is also discussed. Continued and future integration of documentary film into qualitative research is recommended for creatively enhancing our abilities to not only produce strong, rich, and dynamic research outputs, but also simultaneously to explore and communicate diverse knowledges, experiences, and stories.

When is Co-creation Possible?

Research Article| March 01 2020 When is Co-creation Possible? Dorit Naaman Dorit Naaman Dorit Naaman is a professor in the Department of Film and Media, and an affiliated faculty to the Cultural Studies Program at Queen's University in Toronto. Her interactive documentary Jerusalem, We Are Here (2016) models digital witnessing, and has screened in festivals in Canada, the United States, Israel, and Palestine. She writes on Israeli and Palestinian cinemas and media from postcolonialist and feminist perspectives. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2020) 47 (1): 42–47. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2020.471008 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Dorit Naaman; When is Co-creation Possible?. Afterimage 1 March 2020; 47 (1): 42–47. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2020.471008 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search In the early stages of production of the participatory interactive documentary Jerusalem, We Are Here (2016), I described the process I had envisioned to a curator friend. She listened intently and then said, “I think you can pull it off, because you don't have an artist's ego.” I wasn't sure whether this was a compliment, but I recalled this statement recently, when I was asked about my position as an Israeli making a project with and about Palestinians, and a metaphor emerged. “I am the central nervous system of this project,” I replied. “But its heart is entirely Palestinian.” As an Israeli showcasing an actively obfuscated Palestinian past, and as a documentary filmmaker working with non-professionals, I knew from the get-go that I have a lot of structural power: professionally I knew what makes for a good story, and how to go about it. As an Israeli, I also had... You do not currently have access to this content.

Approaching Participatory documentary networks and networking

This contribution conceives of interactive documentaries as relational configurations – as a nexus of discourses and practices. By building theory from practice (i.e. two case studies of interactive documentaries), the axioms of Actor Network Theory will be related to actually ‘doing documentary’ like e.g. interventionist media making (e.g. as delineated by Cizek in her Manifesto for Interventionist Media) or Zimmerman and DeMichiel’s reflections on open space documentary. We suggest moving from Actor Network Theory to an Interventionist Networking Methodology and thinking of emerging documentary assemblages not only in terms of hybrid transdisciplinary, transprofessional networks but pragmatic worknets. This can lead to a better understanding of how to deal with unpredicted developments in participatory interactive documentary making in which networking, different agendas and active intervention are foregrounding.en partant

Temporality in cosmopolitan solidarity: Archival activism and participatory documentary film as mediated witnessing of suffering at Europe’s borders

This article develops and extends the idea of cosmopolitan solidarity to temporality through a case study of archival activism and participatory film-making. It examines mediated witnessing within the Italian online audiovisual archive Archivio delle memorie migranti, which documents and archives the experiences of contemporary migrants in Italy. The moral basis of Archivio delle memorie migranti is cosmopolitan solidarity, which is usually understood as a practice that crosses spatial and communal boundaries. However, the ethics of solidarity also bridges past, present and future generations. Through the case of Archivio delle memorie migranti, this article demonstrates the significance of temporality in the theorization of cosmopolitan solidarity.

From Documentary Realism to Figurative Realism: Igort's The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks and the Holodomor

This essay examines the five stories on the Holodomor in Igort's graphic memoir, The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks: Life and Death under Soviet Rule (English translation, 2016). It argues that the trauma-aesthetic in Igort's work demonstrates a shift from the documentary realist mode through a participatory documentary mode to a figurative realism. If the first seeks to deliver the tragedy of the Holodomor through a certain distanced objective perspective, the second smoothly undermines it by showing us the subjective mediation, of survivors and Igort. The third complicates the trauma by turning humans into ghosts in what the essay argues is a new trauma-aesthetic.

MARSEILLE VS THE MEDITERRANEAN Local Practices of Digital Resistance

This article discusses the creation of a participatory web documentary in Marseille in reaction to the spatial imposition and symbolic productions of two new cultural institutions in the city. Based on observations of the web documentary’s producers and participants and an analysis of the final product, it argues that the former have produced a form of resistance in their empowerment of local individuals and perspectives. These perspectives operate in opposition to those of the new institutions that depict Marseille as a “Mediterranean” city while implicitly and explicitly excluding local particularities and practices, which have paradoxically contributed to the city’s identity and international renown.

Participatory Documentary Then and Now

In this conversation, community media activist jesikah maria ross and filmmaker Vicky Funari talk about the work they have done together in alternative media since the 1990s. Their shared projects include skin•es•the•si•a (1994), an experimental video exploring the cultural codification of the female body; Paulina (1998), a feature-length documentary about a resilient Mexican woman whose parents traded her for land when she was a child; and Maquilápolis [City of Factories] (2006), a participatory documentary that tells the stories of women workers in Tijuana’s multinational factories, and explores through their eyes the transformation of a city and its people by the forces of globalization. Set just after their last collaborative project, Troubled Waters (2014), their conversation addresses the issues of media pedagogy and aesthetics, technological affordances and limits, and the changing state of participatory media production in the United States.

This Is a Reflection: Participatory Documentary in Tutwiler, Mississippi

This Is a Reflection: Participatory Documentary in Tutwiler, Mississippi

Under a Blue Sky – Part 2

As a filmmaker I worked on trauma, loss and mourning in Cambodia from 2008 to 2009, and made a participatory documentary with survivors of the Khmer Rouge Regime. At this time I too experienced violent death in an immediate and personal way, when my beloved partner was killed in an accident. In this article, drafted after I returned from that first visit, I reflect on this private loss, and attempt to analyse and transform it creatively through a public process in which emotions are re-appropriated.

Under a Blue Sky – Part 1

As a filmmaker I worked on trauma, loss and mourning in Cambodia from 2008 to 2009, and made a participatory documentary with survivors of the Khmer Rouge Regime. At this time I too experienced violent death in an immediate and personal way, when my beloved partner was killed in an accident. In this article, drafted after I returned from that first visit, I reflect on this private loss, and attempt to analyse and transform it creatively through a public process in which emotions are re-appropriated.

Exporting Fogo: Participatory Filmmaking, War on Poverty, and the Politics of Visibility

I am frightened by how the intellectual neatness of the philosophy is so flawless that we often seem to feel there is no need to look at our motivations.1IntroductionThe preceding quote is a reflection from Henry Lanford, a research assistant on a 1968 state-sponsored documentary film series, The Farmersville Project (US). A graduate student at the University of Oregon, Lanford had been invited to join a team of Canadian and American filmmakers who were committed to testing the viability of documentary film as an instrument of conflict mediation.2 The setting was California's Central Valley, specifically the town of Farmersville. Farmersville was quickly developing a Mexican American majority, and the racial division between the town's populace and its white power structure was a source of animosity and hostility. The farmworker jobs of retired Okies who still lived in Farmersville were now the jobs of Mexican Americans, whose working conditions were becoming increasingly chemical-intensive and damaging to their health. In response to such conditions, Filipino American and Mexican American farmworkers were organizing themselves and standing up for better working conditions all across the state. Within this context, The Farmersville Project- sponsored by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and directed by the National Film Board of Canada's (NFB) Julian Biggs and Colin Low-yielded thirty-four short documentaries about race relations, farmworkers, and poverty in order to energize new lines of communication in an already polarized town.The Farmersville Project was one of several instances in which the OEO embraced a new participatory documentary approach-one originally developed in Canada-to mitigate entrenched racial and class-based hostilities occurring on the ground. Largely ignored by historians, this documentary experiment and others like it-such as The Hartford Project (US, 1969)-were the result of collaboration between the United States and Canada in the late 1960s. In 1967, the NFB sponsored what became known as The Newfoundland Project: an experiment in participatory filmmaking conducted by Colin Low of NFB and Donald Snowden of Memorial University. Low arrived in Island, Newfoundland, with the expectation that he would produce a traditional documentary about the resistance of Islanders to a government policy of resettlement. Instead, he wound up producing twenty-seven short topical films designed to promote a civil and reconciliatory discourse.3 With the support of community development officer Fred Earle, the films were screened locally as well as to outside policymakers in order to open up new lines of dialogue on a contentious issue. This film practice has been characterized as participatory, in large part because the filmmakers embraced a approach as part of the production and exhibition of these films. The Newfoundland Project, for instance, promoted feedback from the community by allowing those featured in the films to give input during the editing process.4 In a similar vein, post-screening discussions by audience members were viewed as a central component of this approach. The crisis on Island eventually reached a resolution, and the perception of success of the Fogo process-as this participatory documentary approach came to be called-traversed the border and drew the attention of the Public Affairs Office at the OEO.5The embrace of a participatory documentary mode-a more modest and less confident documentary film endeavor-paralleled cracks in managerial liberalism in the 1960s. The OEO's crisis mentality of 1968-a product of external social forces and internal institutional pressures in light of the presidential election- found a synchronous avenue of expression in new participatory documentary practices. The agency sought new ways to access the thorny issue of race and poverty, to address as well as call out subjects caught up in untenable socioeconomic circumstances. …

Reflections on a participatory documentary process: constructing territorial histories of dispossession among Afro‐descendant youth in Colombia

This paper seeks to discuss the use of a participatory documentary process (PDP) in human geography as a method of constructing critical visual information on territorial histories of dispossession. The process was also used to enhance social change both in conjunction with local communities and within the communities themselves. The project involved 14 local young participants and four professionals who collectively produced a documentary on the rural context of violence in La Toma District, Colombia. By enabling the reflections and intentions of young participants in the research process, PDP gave special value to their social and political commitment to supporting community social organisation, and provided fresh research insights into comprehending territorial conflict. The paper concludes that this method amplifies participatory and action research approaches in geography by producing knowledge that is academically and socially relevant. Such collective, emancipatory and anti‐hegemonic visual representations and actions for social change in PDP are especially pertinent in spaces of conflict and violence.

Weighing the evidence: Risks and benefits of participatory documentary in corporatized clinics

This paper describes the effects of one U.S.-based public psychiatry clinic's shift to a centralized, corporate style of management, in response to pressures to cut expenditures by focusing on “evidence based” treatments. Participant observation research conducted between 2008 and 2012 for a larger study involving 127 interviews with policy makers, clinic managers, clinical practitioners and patients revealed that the shift heralded the decline of arts based therapies in the clinic, and of the social networks that had developed around them. It also inspired a participatory video self-documentary project among art group members, to portray the importance of arts-based therapies and garner public support for such therapies. Group members found a way to take action in the face of unilateral decision making, but experienced subsequent restrictions on clinic activities and discharge of core members from the clinic. The paper ends with a discussion of biopolitics, central legibility through corporate standardization, and the potential and risks of participatory documentaries to resist these trends.