Participatory Video

The proliferation of video as a research and community development tool has raised questions about relationships of knowledge production, representation, and reception – specifically relationships between participation, technology, ethics, emotion, audience, and power. Seeking to enable empowerment through people's use of storytelling and representation through video, participatory video's emancipatory agenda has come under recent scrutiny. Researchers are exploring how the media logic of technologies shape, limit, and fix what can be represented and how processes of facilitation and group work constrain and enable different outcomes. However, indigenous media discourse, which acknowledges the highly charged intercultural dynamics and colonial continuities associated with the politics of seeing, remains overlooked in Western scholarship and international development practice. As the dissemination of participatory video products into online environments increases, more work is needed to consider the tensions between individual expression, collective action, and unequal access to digital spaces and video technologies. There is also a growing need to consider how participatory video constructs subjectivity and place through attention to institutional context, embodiment, materiality, and spatiality.