Social movement documentary practices: digital storytelling, social media and organizing

ABSTRACT

Scholars and activists have studied social movement media for its potential to challenge dominant narratives, build community relationships and create social change. This paper presents a case study of two short-form documentary projects with Black Lives Matter 5280 and the Service Employees International Union, Local 105 in Denver, Colorado to explore how collaborative media-making projects assist in building local grassroots campaigns of racial and economic justice. The communication strategies as well as the distribution efforts via online social networks and community screenings are discussed in order to analyse how documentaries rely upon personal narratives to animate members and allies’ feelings and then connect them with traditional forms of organizing like community meetings and public demonstrations. The participatory aspects of filmmaking are viewed through democratic theory, which emphasizes the social relations of citizenship and shared communal values over material and cultural resources, rather than visual aesthetics or technical processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• documentary
• social media
• activist media
• race
• class

Acknowledgements

The author has received no compensation from Black Lives Matter 5280 for his work as a filmmaker and received $1,360 for filming, producing and editing two documentaries with the Service Employees International Union, Local 105.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Gino Canella is a PhD Candidate in Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and a documentary filmmaker. He has worked as a video journalist and editor in television news.

Notes

1. #BlackLivesMatter, when used as a hashtag, is used in this paper to refer to social media-related activities such as calls to action, announcements, or showing solidarity with other chapters, while ‘Black Lives Matter’ is used to refer to the movement as a whole and its offline organizing efforts and campaigns. Making this distinction clearly is somewhat difficult as social media is intimately connected to the movement’s outreach and messaging strategies.