yes / It might be argued that visual methods are particularly appropriate in research involving participants whose ability to express themselves verbally (eg by means of formal interviews) is compromised for some reason. One such group of participants is people with dementia, a condition often characterised by fluctuations in memory, concentration, comprehension and speech. Whilst increased research into the subjective experience of people with dementia is vital, this can often be hampered by the difficulties of ascertaining participants¿ capacity to give informed consent. Ideally, also, research should go beyond non-malfeasance, and offer real benefits to those involved. People with dementia are all too often subjected to social exclusion and narrative dispossession (Baldwin 2006), so research practice should reverse these trends as far as possible.

no

This paper discusses the exploratory process of making a short digital film with two women with early-onset dementia in a day care setting. The film was produced as part of a larger participatory video (PV) pilot project within the day centre. My main subject here is the adaptations to the standard PV process which I made in order for the two women, Pam and Carol*, to be able to take active part. These adjustments took account of their individual abilities related to cognition, physical mobility and social confidence. I discuss the development of an asynchronous approach, which involved my going out into the local community to capture images of Leeds City Market using a mini-camcorder (Flipcam) and the subsequent addition, at the day centre, of voice-over commentary by the two women in response to the visual images they saw on screen. Extracts from their film narrative presented here suggest that participation in the film-making process helped to reconstruct their sense of cultural identity and social engagement. The resulting short film is now being disseminated to Dementia Studies degree students by way of their social networking site.

yes / This chapter considers the adaptations which may need to be made to participatory video in order for it to be accessible to people whose marginalized status stems from a label of 'disability', whether this is physical, sensory or cognitive. To date there has been an ill fit between the emancipatory principles of participatory video, and the technical rationality (Schön, 1996) and hypercognitivity (Post, 2000) of its methods. Because participatory video is intended to enable marginalized, socially excluded and unheard groups of people to make films which reflect their own interests and concerns (Robertson & Shaw, 1997), adaptations to allow people with disabilities to take part would appear vital from an ethical point of view. Yet ethical issues in general do not appear to have been given sufficient consideration in the participatory video literature to date, and there is little evidence of engagement with emergent areas of debate such as the ethics of visual research (Prosser, 2008) and the importance of working in solidarity with people with reduced or fluctuating mental capacity (Nuffield Council for Bioethics, 2009).

no / Within care organizations, “people with dementia” are often labeled as a homogenous group with little differentiating them from each other. This can mark them out as separate from and less capable than those without dementia. When individuals with dementia are described, understood, and related to in terms of their diagnosis, individuality may get lost. In this article, we seek to unsettle the socially constructed boundary between “people with dementia” and people without dementia. This is explored in the context of fieldwork we undertook as part of a Participatory Video project where we worked alongside people with a dementia diagnosis to co-create short films about their interests and concerns. In the process of this work, we found that alternative unities emerged between ourselves and people with dementia, as the dementia label faded into the background and the person, with all his or her diverse interests and life experiences, came to the fore. We found ourselves building rapport and making connections with our research participants, a diverse group of individuals whose life experiences, outlooks, and experiences were simultaneously unique to them but also shared in many ways between themselves, and with us. As we spent time with participants in the communal lounge, in the adjoining day center, walking the hallways, out in the garden, or in individual apartments when invited, we found that people shared a wealth of information with us: about how they were feeling, things they liked, things they had done, instances of trauma, as well as some of their happiest times.

Yes / Film-making is an effective way of engaging people with dementia and improving their well-being. Andrea Capstick and colleagues explain how ‘participatory video’ gave one group an opportunity to tell their own story in film.

Does digitally-mediated farmer-to-farmer learning facilitate farm-level adaptation to climate change? Utilizing semi-structured interviews with small-scale organic farmers in the Cascadia Bioregion, I document how farmers perceive climate change and in what ways they are responding and/or adapting to these changes. Such small-scale farms have limited economic capacity to adapt to climate change. Access to innovative, low-cost but locally relevant solutions will require novel knowledge-dissemination mechanisms. A modern option is “participatory media” - a social network based approach, linking farmers to farmers through internet-exchange of photos and video. This project engages in a “bottom-up” approach to the development and sharing of knowledge. In collaboration with local farmers, I explored the efficacy of a participatory media method in moving towards improving farmers’ perception of and adaptation to climate change, as well as overall farm-level resilience. / Graduate

This research explores how Participatory Video (PV) can facilitate empowerment and strengthen dialogue and engagement for public policy with members of recycling cooperatives and government in the greater metropolitan region of São Paulo, Brazil. The research project provided opportunities for catadores/as (‘recyclers’) to explore PV as a way to shed light on their livelihood challenges, but also as an approach to celebrate, demonstrate and legitimize the value and significance of their work to local government and community. Working through a participatory approach, twenty-two leaders from eleven cooperatives were involved in all aspects of the video-making process, from script writing to filming, group editing and knowledge mobilization. The research took place during nine months of fieldwork located in four municipalities in the greater metropolitan region of São Paulo, Brazil using multiple ethnographic and participatory methods. The methodology for this research is action-oriented, and applies a participatory community-based multi-methods approach. The purpose of the videos was to relay the message that catadores/as perform a valuable service to society, and through the organization of cooperatives have the capacity to be further supported and integrated into waste management programs. The videos were used as a tool for communication with government and for community outreach. This research is supported through the Participatory Sustainable Waste Management (PSWM) project, a six-year Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) funded University Partnership project (2005-2011). The overall purpose of the participatory-based PSWM project was to increase the effectiveness, safety, and income generation of organized waste recycling in originally four and later six Brazilian municipalities in the metropolitan region of São Paulo: Santo André, Diadema, Ribeirão Pires, São Bernardo do Campo, Mauá and some parts of the municipality of São Paulo. The capacity building activities and actions of the PSWM project have contributed to structure, organize and strengthen cooperative recycling enterprises and their members, for example, by setting up a pilot project on micro-credit and advancing the practice of solidarity economy through collective commercialization and networking of the recyclers in the region. In addition, the project has helped create a more inclusive culture amongst the local governments in this region, where many recyclers are now present in political meetings and decision making related to waste management. Unfortunately, this is not the case in all the municipalities and there are still barriers to participatory models in decision-making and a lack of political support. Findings support the conclusion that PV can be a powerful methodological tool contributing to the process of individual, community and organizational empowerment and is significant for democratic governance and the increasingly popular notion of the knowledge democracy. This research also has policy relevance and practical application. The findings have the capacity to inform models of participatory governance, and improved democratic processes in addressing complex urban development challenges, in addition to advancing practices in government accountability and transparency. / Graduate / 0344 / 0700 / 0999 / crystaltre@gmail.com

In the early summer months of the global coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, three community-produced participatory videos were conducted on a remote basis. These projects were made in Uganda, Germany and Turkey with the use of mobile technology to understand the impact of the virus on lives of different refugee communities in distant locations around the world. This study evaluates the potential of using the emerging practice of remote participatory video at times of crisis by presenting a case study on one of the participatory video works undertaken in Rhino Camp which is one of the largest refugee camps in Uganda. Drawing on the common production stages within the traditional participatory video practices this thesis presents a preliminary outline for facilitating a remote participatory video. By deploying an affordance approach, it is aimed to investigate how participatory video was translated into a remote practice. By drawing on the Freirean process of critical consciousness the study investigates the ways in which communicative affordances of remote PV could be utilised to promote advocacy during the pandemic. Another objective of the thesis is to explore what unique local experiences and insights could refugees from Rhino Camp bring to bear on the problems caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Focusing on the analysis of the video messages from the refugees of Rhino Camp, the study explores the following question: What significance and potential could the use of remote practice of civil society produced participatory video have during the COVID-19 outbreak?

This thesis systematically captures participatory video practitioners’ reflections on their role to examine variations in practitioners’ conceptions of participatory video practice by examining the internal coherence and collective learning interaction of the community of practitioners. This is a relevant area of research in the field of development studies because it stimulates reflection and helps the evaluation of prevailing participatory development approaches, allowing for collective practice improvement, maximizing potentials, and minimizing risks. Participatory video (PV) is a facilitated group process of media production. The interest in, funding for and number of PV projects in development is growing, due to its celebrated ideological potential to bring social change, to identify community needs and empower marginalized groups. However, the mainstreaming of participatory approaches to development has triggered a wave of admonitions about ethical, institutional, and personal challenges that these contain. In its wake has a previously uncritical focus on PV’s potentials recently led a group of scholar practitioners to engage in reflecting on their ideology, practice realities and tensions in their role. The thesis contributes original knowledge to the scholarly discourse by collectivizing information on a wider group of PV practitioners. The research drew on existing scholarly work abductively to develop an interview guide, then qualitative data was first collected in semi-structured interviews to gain a fine-grained view on the practitioner community’s reflections. In a second phase of primary data collection, practitioners were given the opportunity to collectively discuss the preliminary findings in an online workshop. The research uses a phenomenographic categorization to group practitioners’ conceptualizations and Wenger’s community of practice concept (1998) as analytical framework. It finds five distinctive practitioner roles; the Activists, Collaborators, Educators, Organizers and Safe-keepers which emphasize different parts of practice to different extents. It further finds that a community of practice does not exist between PV practitioners due to both a lack of quantity and quality of interaction and significant divisions between practitioner subgroups and gives recommendations on how to enhance mutual learning and collective reflection in the future.