The Voicing Hidden Histories project: participatory video in development, soft power and film language

ABSTRACT

In this article, we wish to reflect upon some of the findings of a recent Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Global Challenges Research Fund Participatory Video (PV) project ‘Voicing Hidden Histories’. Working in South Africa, India and Brazil, this project has been using PV to support specific marginalised communities in each country to challenge the way their nations present themselves – and in particular their national history – to the world via ‘nation branding’ and other ‘soft power’ initiatives. Specifically, we ask: why use filmmaking as an international development tool? What are the enablers of – and barriers to – successful PV initiatives and what does ‘success’ mean in this context? Moreover, while such projects invariably make claims for PV as a particularly effective method for ‘giving’ communities ‘voice’ – however such potentially patronising terms might be defined – very little space is usually dedicated to the exploration of the films produced in such projects, that is to the specific articulation of this ‘voice’. Thus, we also wish to challenge a trend in the analysis of such projects that focuses entirely on questions of methodology and an understanding of PV as a process, largely ignoring the products made.

KEYWORDS:

• Participatory video
• South Africa
• Brazil
• India
• soft power
• development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Paul Cooke is Centenary Chair of World Cinemas at the University of Leeds. He is currently involved in an AHRC project exploring the role of film as a tool for the generation of ‘Soft Power’ across the BRICS group of emerging nations and a number of participatory filmmaking projects in Germany, South Africa, India, Brazil and Nepal.

Stephanie Dennison is a Professor of Brazilian Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. She founded the Centre for World Cinema at Leeds and co-edited Remapping World Cinema (2006) with Song Hwee Lim. She was a Leverhulme International Academic Fellow at UNICAMP in 2015 and she edits, with Paul Cooke, the Routledge book series Remapping World Cinema. She is Director of the international research network Soft Power, Cinema and the BRICS.

William Gould is Professor of Indian History at the University of Leeds. He is author of Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics (2004), Religion and Conflict in South Asia (2012) and Bureaucracy, Community and Influence: Society and the State in India (2011) and is working on a number of participatory development projects in India focussed on the plight of the denotified tribes and promoting voter registration.

ORCID

Paul Cooke http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8377-3118

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council: [Grant Number Grant AH/P007511/1].