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.

Keywords:

• participatory video
• young people
• research process
• motivations and benefits in research
• fieldwork relationships

Acknowledgements

We very much appreciate the trust and engagement from the young people during the project. Petra would like to thank her colleagues from Ulita for their patience in coping with her initiatives. Matej wishes to thank Kye Askins and Hester Parr for their counsel on participatory video (and participatory research in general) and Fiona Smith for her ongoing support as the doctoral project supervisor. We both owe gratitude to the special issue editors and to two anonymous reviewers for their extremely constructive and supportive feedback. The paper developed during the knowledge exchange project “Community Youth Work and Social Research–Knowledge Transfer, Informing Policy and Further Opportunities for Collaboration”, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Matej's doctoral research that involved this video project was co-funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and the Royal Society.

Notes

Further examples of participatory video with children and young people can be found in other disciplines but even these are not many (e.g. Haw 2008, Moletsane et al. 2008). A handful of expanded accounts also exist written by community practitioners (e.g. Garthwaite 2000, Menter et al. 2006).

We should note that the project from which Parr's paper draws was not a ‘fully participative video production’ (Parr 2007, p. 119) and evolved from far more complex sets of expectations, initiatives, and ‘commissions’. However, those Parr's arguments that we discuss here are pertinent also for the area of participatory video.

Detached youth work was the community centre's central method of engaging with children and young people from the neighbourhood. It is a youth work provision that takes place in young people's own territories, mainly on the street. The British Federation for Detached Youth Work gives the following description of the approach: ‘As with all youth work, [detached youth work] uses the principles and practices of informal education to engage young people in constructive dialogue, within a broad agenda of personal and social development … Detached youth work, however, is distinct from all other forms of youth work as … detached youth workers work where young people have chosen to be, whether this be streets, cafes, shopping centres etc. workers make contact with young people wherever they are. So detached youth work is often free from the constraints of centre-based youth work – where buildings are specifically set up for the purpose of youth work. This is not to say buildings won't be used; indeed they sometimes become a feature of more developed practice. But in detached youth work, contact happens on the street, and relationships are developed there too’. See http://www.detachedyouthwork.info.

The young people were involved in other activities during this period, but they were focused mostly on group development and had little or no connection to the video process or to ‘doing research’ in any broader sense. We do not discuss these activities in this paper.

Although we use the term ‘the young people’ throughout the paper, we do not want to suggest any kind of homogeneity within the group – as will be clear from our further discussion. However, the intra-group diversity was much more complex and diffused than the basic gender/ethnicity/class division could account for (see Moser 2007). We discuss these differences only to the extent we find this important for our arguments and feasible without breaching the anonymity of the participants.

The group was formed relatively smoothly as only these six young people expressed their interest in the international exchange and attended group meetings regularly (throughout the year before the video project began).

Initially, Matej did the editing, following instructions from the group after group previews of the footage. After this disagreement, some members of the group joined him for the editing, meaning they worked 6–7 h per day for a couple of days.

Designing the structure of the video was a difficult and painful process, especially the spoken content. In the end, we suggested a method similar to the SWOT analysis and it was approved by the group. The young people replied to the questions ‘What I like in the neighbourhood, ‘What I don't like in the neighbourhood’, and ‘What could be changed in the neighbourhood’. Reflecting collectively on individual ideas from group members generated the main body of the spoken content of the video.

There are links between these themes and the concept of informal education (see www.infed.org). The international exchange where the video was presented was itself funded through the European Union ‘Youth in Action’ programme, which promotes informal learning in young people's development. Several of the young people in our group struggled academically in mainstream education and the use of video helped them in particular to get beyond the necessity of relying on language and text. Some struggled even with reading and writing, felt awkward when this was required from them, and avoided such activities. See also Bull et al. (2008) for a profound discussion of connections between informal learning and participatory media and Cain (2009) for a more specific view on video in the context of community education.