Participatory Filmmaking Research Articles

Female fighters shooting back: representation and filmmaking in post-conflict societies

ABSTRACT Despite the fascination with female fighters in the international media, there is still limited knowledge about how female combatants see themselves and how their conflict experiences shape their lives after war. Women’s participation in armed conflict is often dismissed and depoliticized, emphasizing either their role as victims or as peacemakers. This article contributes to a body of literature that foregrounds the diverse voices of ex-combatant women, as a particular group who challenged traditional gender norms during conflict. Their narratives complicate the simplistic and limited depictions of female combatants and instead reveal a multi-layered and complex account of how communities of female ex-combatants frame their wartime experiences and daily lives today. The article proposes participatory documentary filmmaking as a feminist method to make female combatants’ experiences in conflict visible without extracting knowledge or speaking on their behalf. Working with two ex-combatant women from non-state armed movements in Aceh (Indonesia) and Burundi as co-researchers who collected and curated the stories of their former comrades on camera means that a more diverse and personal picture emerges. This article highlights the challenges, complexities, and possibilities of participatory filmmaking as an approach that can enrich the methodological toolkit of scholars researching women in conflict.

Voice, autonomy and utopian desire in participatory film-making with young refugees

This article is a reflection on what reflexive documentary scholars call the ‘moral dimension’ (Nash, 2012: 318) of a participatory film-making project with refugee young people who wanted to make a film to support other new young arrivals in the process of making home in Scotland. In the first part, we highlight some of the challenges of collaborating with refugee young people, in light of the often dehumanizing representations of refugees in mainstream media and the danger of the triple conflation of authenticity–voice–pain in academic narratives about refugees. In the second part, we show how honouring young people’s desire to convey the hopeful aspects of making home emerged as a key pedagogical strategy to affirm their expert position and encourage their participation in the project. Revisiting key moments of learning and interaction, we demonstrate how young people’s process of ‘finding a voice’ in moment-by-moment film-making practice was not a linear, developmental process towards ‘pure’ individual empowerment and singular artistic expression. Their participation in shaping their visual (self-)representation in the final film was embedded in the dialogical process and pragmatic requirements of a collaborative film production, in which voice, autonomy and teacher authority were negotiated on a moment-by-moment basis. We conclude that it is vital for a reflexive practice and research not to gloss over the moral dilemmas in the name of progressive ideals, for example, when representations are co-created by project film-makers/educators, but to embrace these deliberations as part of the ‘fascinating collaborative matrix’ (Chambers, 2019: 29) of participatory film-making.

The Born-Free Generation

Paul Cooke explores an arts-based development project that took place in South Afrika around ‘Safe Parks’ in Johannesburg. Cooke’s research statement analyses the film’s co-creation with its collaborator and subject, the young filmmaker Phendulani, and in so doing, deconstructs the relationship between filmmaker and subject. The film makes the process of participatory filmmaking explicit, drawing on self-reflexive practice and foregrounds the on-going ethical dilemmas that arise from this kind of collaborative project. In this artist-researcher-teacher role, Cooke has developed a number of participatory filmmaking projects, that use filmmaking as a powerful tool for social action.

Participatory filmmaking in voluntary sector research: innovative or problematic?

This paper draws both on the authors’ experiences of making a participatory film exploring collective leadership in diverse communities, and on a world café style workshop at the 2018 Voluntary Sector and Volunteering Research Conference organised by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations and the Voluntary Sector Studies Network. The intention is to provoke dialogue about the opportunities and challenges of participatory filmmaking as a research method, and whether it is an appropriate methodological approach for voluntary sector research, with the potential to advance thinking on about and the use of mixed-media methods.

A participatory filmmaking process with children with disabilities in rural India: Working towards inclusive research

Children with disabilities often experience exclusion within their communities, and this exclusion can extend into research processes. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, however, emphasizes that children of all abilities need to be involved as decision makers in matters affecting them. This article provides an in-depth description of the process of a participatory action research project carried out with children with disabilities from a rural village in India. It argues for the utility of participatory filmmaking as a research methodology that supports inclusion of children with disabilities as co-researchers in research and action processes. The different phases of the research project, namely the preparatory, participatory research, and the action phase, are made transparent along with the details of activities carried out within each phase. The technical and pragmatic challenges faced within this participatory filmmaking process are pointed out, and strategies used to negotiate challenges and adapt this methodology to fit context-specific needs are shared. This account of the complex, yet flexible and adaptable, participatory filmmaking process is presented as means to support critical and informed uptakes of participatory filmmaking for inclusive research practices with children with disabilities.

Exile, Return, Record Exploring Historical Narratives and Community Resistance through Participatory Filmmaking in ‘Post-conflict’ Guatemala

Following previous experiences of violence and forced displacement, ‘the returnees’ from the Guatemalan campesino community ‘Copal AA la Esperanza’ are now defending their territory against the construction of a hydroelectric dam. The returnees unexpectedly mobilized me as a Belgian historian to ‘make’ their ‘shared history’ and produce a documentary about their past and present struggle. The aim of this article is to reflect on how and why I developed a participatory, filmmaking-based methodology to tackle this challenge. I focus on filmmaking, participation and knowledge production to demonstrate the epistemological and ethical benefits of a dialogue between disciplines and methodologies as much as between academic and community practices and concepts. As such, I exemplify my visual participatory approach through its engagement with post-colonial histories and the co-creation of shared knowledge at the intersection of community and research interests. Moreover, I demonstrate how filmmaking can be developed as a grounded, visual, and narrative approach connecting media activism with ‘performative ethnography’. Combining insights from participatory action research (PAR) with Johannes Fabian’s notion of ‘performance’, I argue for ‘nonextractivist methodologies’; ‘knowing with’ instead of ‘knowing-about’. From being a side project and a matter of research ethics, participatory filmmaking turned for me into an investigative tool to explore the collective production and mobilization of historical narratives. I argue that participatory research should not be limited to communities participating in research projects; researchers can equally participate in community projects without this obstructing scientific research. In sum, participatory visual methods challenge us to reconsider the role of academics in (post-conflict) settings.

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.

More Than Talking

Participation in qualitative research frequently relies upon recall and verbal expression, which may be difficult for some people with dementia. While the use of arts-based and visual methods are transforming dementia care, exploratory research and evaluation methods have lagged behind with regard to the use of innovative qualitative approaches. This scoping review identified innovative qualitative methods that have been used to effectively engage and involve people with dementia in social and health research. Systematic searches of academic databases, Google Scholar, and hand searches identified 24 peer-reviewed articles published since 2010 for inclusion. Analysis focused on a description of both the motivation and methods ascribed by the researchers and how the capacities of people with dementia were engaged as part of the research process. The most frequently used innovative method was Photovoice. Action research, case study, narrative production, ethnography, participatory filmmaking and theater, co-research, and mixed methods were also used. Regardless of methodology, most studies used a participatory approach that incorporated visual methods alongside adapted semistructured or unstructured interviews. Researchers were focused on inclusion, empowerment, self-expression, flexibility, and communication when selecting methods. Providing an appropriate research environment and committing time for repeat contact, observation, and engagement were important considerations.

Analyzing Participatory Cultural Practices in a Medium-Scale Swiss Town: How Multiple Belongings are Constructed and Consolidated Through an Interactive Filmmaking Process

Abstract THIS PAPER DEALS WITH A PARTICIPATORY FILMMAKING PROJECT INVOLVING YOUNG RESIDENTS OF A NEIGHBORHOOD IN A SWISS TOWN, LOCAL SOCIOCULTURAL AND POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE LOCAL POLICE, AND AN INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER. SEEKING TO QUERY WHAT PARTICIPATION MEANS IN SUCH A SETTING, WE PROPOSE AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK THAT CONSIDERS THREE SCALES OF PARTICIPATION: THE PARTICIPATORY NODE, THE PARTICIPATIVE COLLABORATION, AND PARTICIPATION AS AN ARGUMENT IN THE TOP-DOWN SETTING OF A MUNICIPAL POLICY. AS RESEARCHERS, WE ACTIVELY PARTICIPATED IN THE ANALYSIS OF THE ENTIRE RAW UNEDITED FILM MATERIAL THAT DOCUMENTS THE WHOLE PRODUCTION PROCESS. FOCUSING ON THE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN THE FILMMAKER AND THE YOUTHS, THE PAPER EXPLORES HOW MULTIPLE BELONGINGS ARE MOBILIZED IN ORDER TO NEGOTIATE THE FRONTIER BETWEEN PARTICIPATION AND AUTHORITY, NAMELY THROUGH JOKING RELATIONSHIPS. WE DIFFERENTIATE THIS FORM OF AUTHORITY FROM THE SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE EXERTED BY INSTITUTIONAL REPRESENTATIVES IN ORDER TO HIGHLIGHT THE CONDITIONS BY WHICH ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP IS MADE POSSIBLE.

Envisioning Democracy: Participatory Filmmaking with Homeless Youth.

This paper explores the democratic potential for participatory filmmaking with homeless youth, as well as the constraints and dilemmas associated with this visual method. Theorizing democracy through the work of Hannah Arendt and Pierre Bourdieu, the paper approaches democracy not as an end, but rather as a process that seeks to lessen social injustice. Bourdieu's work helps us appreciate, however, that this process is constrained by structures of inequality that shape access to the political dispositions that enable such engagement. Consistent with other research on low-income and marginalized young people, this study found that homeless youth engage with democracy through forms of community participation and mutual support, and are disinclined to orient toward liberal democratic structures such as voting and political parties, which they see as harmful or problematic. With a focus on one particular dilemma faced by the research team-namely, the question of how to make sense of and represent the issue of legalizing marijuana, which had been signaled by the youth participants as of primary political importance to them-the paper uses Arendt and Bourdieu to discuss how participatory filmmaking can help to expand thespace of appearances available to homeless youth in Canadian society, and create a space at a shared table of understanding with middle class power brokers.

Participatory Filmmaking Pedagogies in Schools: Tensions Between Critical Representation and Perpetuating Gendered and Heterosexist Discourses.

Although participatory media practices are often adopted to address social issues with youth in school and community contexts, there is a lack of critical analysis of the visual and discursive representations that organize student-produced participatory films. To respond to this concern, I employ critical discourse analysis to examine a series of films that were created for a New Brunswick school-based participatory filmmaking program that I coordinate, called What’s up Doc? Since the project’s inception in 2009, students have produced over 60 films that have raised institutional critiques, troubled inequitable discourses, and addressed social justice issues. Drawing attention to discourses that framed students’ films, I show how the work may perpetuate, rather than fully resist, marginalizing discourses, narratives, and visual representations. In particular, I show how the films may reproduce and authorize sexist discourses, demeaning narratives, and heteronormative assumptions. Youth may have undertaken filmmaking to generate social commentary and resist inequity, but critical engagement with the What’s up Doc? program demonstrates how discursive power operates on, in, and through participatory media texts.

«Включенное» этнографическое кино: межкультурное сотрудничество в исследованиях и кинопроизводстве (пер. с англ. Е.В. ван Гервен)

«Включенное» этнографическое кино: межкультурное сотрудничество в исследованиях и кинопроизводстве (пер. с англ. Е.В. ван Гервен)

Crossin’ the Bridge: A Participatory Approach to Filmmaking

This chapter describes the value of participatory filmmaking with “marginalized” learners tackling the issue of mental illness in a border community.

Sustained Engagement to Create Resilient Communities: How a Collaborative Design Approach can Broker and Mobilise Practitioner–Participant Interaction

AbstractWhen conducting research with young people, studies consistently cite the need to establish trust and rapport with participants. However, what frequently goes unreported is how to evolve these often highly fragile research relationships, and the subtle tensions and negotiations that can occur. In this article I reflect on my experience of collaborating with a group of young people, identified by their school teachers as vulnerable and at risk of falling through the educational net post compulsory schooling. Through a reflexive approach, this article explores how the use of a participatory filmmaking method enabled and sustained a research relationship between the participants and myself, outlining how trust and rapport gradually emerged. Drawing on relational ethics, I describe the catalysing and democratising role creativity played in gaining insights into group dynamics and the implicit strategies adopted by the young people in the search for social self‐empowerment.

Locating a ‘third voice’: participatory filmmaking and the everyday in rural India

ABSTRACTThis article reflects on practice-led research involving a community video project in southern India. The filmmaker also asked four of the women in this project if they would use their cameras to film their everyday lives. In the early 1980s, Barbara Myerhoff mentioned in a conference panel session the concept of a ‘third voice’ created through participatory research, when the ethnographer’s and the subjects’ contributions are edited together in such a way to form a new perspective [Kaminsky, M. 1992. “Myerhoff’s ‘Third Voice’: Ideology and Genre in Ethnographic Narrative.” Social Text 33: 124–144 (127)]. In this article, the filmmaker discusses how she used participatory and observational documentary techniques and ‘video diary interviews’, to produce five different sources of footage ‘blended in such a manner as to make it impossible to discern which voice dominates the work … films where outsider and insider visions coalesce’ [Ruby, J. 1991. “Speaking for, Speaking About, Speaking With, or Speaking Alongside: an Anthropological and Documentary Dilemma.” Visual Anthropology Review 7 (2): 50–67 (62)]. This article examines the challenges of working in this way and considers whether this technique of filmmaking can reveal new knowledge about the everyday lives of four particular women living in rural Andhra Pradesh.

Hitting the right note for child and adolescent mental and emotional wellbeing: a formative qualitative evaluation of Sistema Scotland’s “Big Noise” orchestral programme

Purpose – Previous research emphasises the need for preventative interventions to reduce mental health problems among disadvantaged children and adolescents. There is however little consensus concerning the delivery and impacts of such interventions particularly non-clinical, arts-based models delivered within community settings. The purpose of this paper is to begin to address this deficit through a qualitative assessment of the short- to medium-term impacts to participants’ mental and emotional wellbeing within Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise orchestral programme. Design/methodology/approach – Semi-structured interviews, observation, participant drawing exercise, participatory filmmaking, focus group and analysis of programme engagement were undertaken to examine the mental and emotional wellbeing impacts of the programme which are observable at this early stage of programme delivery and participants’ lives. Findings – The qualitative findings indicate that participation in the Big Noise programme enhances participant mental and emotional wellbeing in three ways; first, the happiness and enjoyment of taking part in the programme and orchestra, particularly from music making; second, the security, belonging and relationships fostered through participation; the quality of musician/participant relationship is important here as is programme design which enables support, routine and structure; and third, increased pride, confidence and self-esteem, as a result of acquiring difficult musical skills, receiving regular praise and having frequent opportunities to demonstrate these acquired skills through regular orchestral performances. Originality/value – There is little evidence or understanding of community-based, preventative, arts interventions like Big Noise: their delivery, their life-course impacts and their potential contribution to mental health and to addressing social and health inequalities. The causal pathways in the field are under-theorised. These early findings are important as they serve as an important basis from which to consider the programme’s wider and longer term impacts, which will be assessed through an on-going longitudinal, mixed method summative evaluation.

Regarding the Pain of Others: Migrant Self-Narration, Participatory Filmmaking, and Academic Collaborations

Author(s): Clo, Clarissa; Ferme, Valerio; O'Healy, Aine; Verdicchio, Pasquale | Abstract: In March 2014 we collaborated on a common cultural project, hosting the visit of three activists from Italy—Stefano Liberti, Andrea Segre, and Dagmawi Yimer—to our respective universities in California. As filmmakers and reporters in a variety of media, the three of them engage with contemporary human rights abuses connected to Italy’s involvement in the control of Mediterranean migration. In our respective programs we screened one or more of their documentaries with Liberti, Segre, and Yimer in attendance and in dialogue with the spectators: A Sud di Lampedusa (2006), about migrants in sub-Saharan Africa trying to reach Libya to find employment; Come un uomo sulla terra (2008), about the difficult trajectory traversed by Yimer and many of his compatriots from Ethiopia to Italy via Sudan and Libya; Mare chiuso (2012), about Italy and the EU’s pushback policies following a number of controversial decrees enacted by Berlusconi’s government in cahoots with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi; and Va pensiero (2013), about two vicious incidents of racism directed at African immigrants in Florence and Milan.Ideally, and perhaps idealistically, we wanted to engage students, colleagues and local communities in a transnational dialogue across continents on issues that are global, and which are as much about biopolitics and ethics as they are about poetics and aesthetics. Formerly the site of multiple European and American colonial and imperialist conquests, California is a state that has been traversed and transformed historically and physically by different waves of migration. As such, it offered each of us, through our respective geographical and cultural points of belonging, the opportunity to engage the work of Liberti, Segre, and Yimer from a variety of perspectives and refraction points.We believe that a theoretical and aesthetic discussion of the films must be accompanied by a reflection on our locations, our academic work, and our pedagogical practices. Precisely because we welcomed our guests at both public and private institutions, with different missions, objectives, and audiences, we find it compelling to examine the various permutations and kinds of reception that these presentations produced. This essay, therefore also addresses the role that collaboration plays not only in organizing events of such magnitude and import, but also in providing pedagogical and scholarly advantages for us as intellectuals and for students who are the recipients of such practices. Our collaboration has forced us to consider, among other things, why broader academic exchanges such as ours do not happen more frequently, and to explore the material and intellectual obstacles that render such collaborations rare, not simply in Italian Studies, but in the humanities in general, across campuses and colleges.

Encountering Vulnerabilities through ‘Filmmaking for Fieldwork’

In this article we discuss the potential of observational and participatory filmmaking methods to both explore and represent a research subject through a documentary film. We position our project ‘British Born Chinese’ about the experiences of the second generation of Chinese migrants in relation to other recent audio-visual interventions in IR, and present our methodological approach of observational and dialogical engagement with participants and the ethics of representation related to it. In doing this, we explore the potential of audio-visual research to go beyond identity-based forms of inquiries concerning, in particular, migrant and diasporic experiences. Our aim is to develop a situated and contextualised understanding of how and under what conditions individuals resort to racialised forms of belonging. We consider the promise and limitations of observational filmmaking to depart from the structures of representation to evoke alternative solidarities around vulnerability.

Moving Beyond “Health Education”: Participatory Filmmaking for Cross-Cultural Health Communication

In the process of developing short films with women in Australian Aboriginal (Yolŋu) communities in northeast Arnhem Land, questions arose about how the content and the process of production were defined and adjusted to suit both parties. This research examines how filmmakers take roles as health educators and how Yolŋu women as the “actors” define and direct the film. It explores ways that the filmmakers tried to ensure that Yolŋu identity was maintained in a biomedical agenda through the use of storytelling in language. An important dialogue develops regarding ownership and negotiation of health information and knowledge, addressing this intersection in a way that truly characterizes the spirit of community-based participatory research. Although the filmmaking processes were initially analyzed in the context of feminist and educational empowerment theories, we conclude that Latour’s (2005) theory of actor networks leads to a more coherent way to explore participatory filmmaking as a health education tool. The analysis in this work provides a framework to integrate health communication, Indigenous women’s issues, and filmmaking practices. In contrasting participatory filmmaking with health promotion and ethnographic film, the importance of negotiating the agenda is revealed.

Participatory filmmaking with Qur’anic students in Kano, Nigeria: ‘speak good about us or keep quiet!’

‘Participatory’ research is often presented as a means to ‘empower’ stigmatised groups by addressing shame and by promoting attitude changes. Drawing on experiences producing a ‘participatory’ docudrama with traditional Qur’anic students (almajirai) in Kano, northern Nigeria, I reflect on the limits of ‘participatory’ research as a tool for ‘empowerment’. I describe the risks stigmatised groups may incur by participating, and consider to what extent, if at all, it can foster social change. The almajirai have attracted negative attention as presumed victims of child neglect and as ‘cannon fodder’ for Islamic radicalisation. Their participation in the filmmaking gave them an opportunity to voice their concerns and to rebuke those treating them heedlessly. At the same time, they became vulnerable to accusations and suspicions within their communities. To escape the negative connotations of poverty, they deemphasised its role for almajiri enrolment, thus concealing structural inequalities.