Paper short abstract:

Through the process of production as well as dissemination of edutainment dramas, I wanted to create an enabling environment for female and male youth to acquire correct reproductive health information and to enable reflection and discussion on sexuality in a context where silence prevails.

Paper long abstract:

I had already conducted research on gender issues and education in North-Ethiopia's Tigray-region for many years, when I got involved in a research project on competing norms surrounding sexual and reproductive health. My rationale for involving urban and rural, female and male secondary school students (aged 15-22) in the making of arts- and action-research-inspired research-based edutainment dramas on love and sexuality, contraceptive use and abortion was that youth cannot wait for our research to be published. They need to be involved now! I wanted through the process of production as well as dissemination of the edutainment dramas to create an enabling environment for female and male youth to acquire correct reproductive health information and to enable reflection and discussion on sexuality in a context where silence prevails. I also used the dramas to generate data on gender norms and youth sexuality when discussion them, with students, parents, teachers, health workers and religious leaders. Five edutainment dramas and three documentaries, where produced. The youth were also trained in filmmaking and gradually became involved in the production itself.

See the films here (English sub-titles):

Choices & Consequences, part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQFe-3JBYFY

Choices & Consequences, part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diZtnca515Y

Choices & Consequences, part 3-4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_SgOPYNfvg

Love Complications: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmvmhW_bLAM

Dialogues about abortion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhXcK-IU_Mg

Participants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvkkcjFAyKg

Masho's Dialogue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvjjyaDlX5Y

Paper short abstract:

We collaboratively reflect with the project's participants on the process of filming and editing a participatory film remotely and online. The design of the remote participatory video was developed as a response to the C-19 pandemic using women's smartphones.

Paper long abstract:

In this session we collaboratively reflect with the project's participants on the process of filming and editing an innovative participatory video conducted remotely. The project called: 'Reinventada: the realities of women in Medellin during the pandemic', led by Dr Sonja Marzi and funded by an LSE Knowledge Exchange and Impact fund, explores the impact of the 2020 pandemic on women's everyday lives in Medellin. In collaboration with the women, who live in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the city, we developed a pioneering remote participatory video process using women's smartphones to film and edit videos collaboratively. We trained the participants on how to best use web platforms and available technology, setting up weekly online meetings for workshops on filming techniques and how best to use their smartphones, to film, discuss film content and to edit the final documentary together. The majority of women who participated only had limited or no technological knowledge and filming experience or skills. Collaboratively with the women who participated in the project in Medellin we will discuss how they felt during the filming and editing activities and let them reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of making a film to communicate their realities in Medellin during the pandemic, while at the same time becoming proficient in filming with their smartphones, sending data and joining online workshops.

Please see here the project website: www.reinventada.org

Paper short abstract:

We consider South African co-creators of Ilizwi Lenyaniso Lomhlaba, their reflections on stories, & how they make sense of power and meaning-making. Our approach is decolonial and invested in co-creation in this work on post-conflict, voicing issues related to land, stewardship and futures.

Paper long abstract:

In the paper, our specific focus is on methodologies developed with the young South African co-creators of Ilizwi Lenyaniso Lomhlaba and their reflections on stories, power and meaning-making. We offer a critical consideration of co-production in the context of GCRF-funded research led by two forms of representation: participatory film-making and performance. We will introduce the project and builds a methodology of intersectionality and 'seeing power'. By attending to its importance in pedagogies and participatory processes, we offer reflections of how lived experience, conditions and dynamics come to the fore in the process, and how these young people make sense of power through their films.

We consider regimes of power related to funding, legacies of dispossession and ongoing peripheralization at the same time as highlighting the achievements of young people's participation in formulating the stories of their world. We provide close engagement with the processes of training, partnership-building and forging creative campaigns with the newly formed co-creator collective, whose ethnographic films and performance contribute to voicing issues related to land, stewardship and futures.

Pre-watch if possible:

2 of the films produced by Ilizwi are viewed on their Youtube Channel:

Thuyspunt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0pKi8YmX1g

Elizabeth Maarman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bppu-Z-qdp4&t=10s

Paper short abstract:

We offer critical reflections on intergenerational activist digital storytelling research exploring why/how diverse activists work for change and story their resistance throughout their lives. Showing some of the stories, we explore how this project might build relationships of/as resistance.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will offer critical reflections on a multi-year digital storytelling research project, called Stories of Resistance, Resurgence, and Resilience in Nogojiwanong, based at Trent University, in Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg territory. At the confluence of queer, decolonial, and feminist approaches to research and pedagogy, the project aims to build relationships of/as resistance, while documenting an oral history of activisms and activist connections in place. Through a series of intergenerational participatory digital storytelling workshops, academics, students, and activists come together across four generations to share and record their stories of working for change. Participants engage in circle conversations, ceremony, song, and small group storytelling interviews, building relationships, recording stories, taking photos, and collaboratively producing short media capsules of these exchanges. These capsules are shared widely and archived for future generations. This project explicitly aims to explore and document the lesser-told stories of non-famous activists and to unsettle dominant perceptions of "activism" as limited to processes of "un-making" (dismantling, resisting, exposing) oppressions through protest or rally. Instead, we invite activists of different ages, backgrounds, abilities and genders to also consider activist ways of "making" (through creative work, land-based practices, and ceremony) different, fairer, more sustainable futures. This presentation will offer critical reflections on the process, possibilities, limitations, and emerging themes from the first three rounds of workshops. It will also provide an opportunity to watch and discuss excerpts of the digital stories produced - hearing from a series of storytellers about their (un)makings.

Links: www.agingactivisms.org

video of storyteller Tasha Beeds https://vimeo.com/322243300/aba152e781

Paper short abstract:

This paper offers a glimpse into the author’s PhD research project, an audio-visual ethnography with and about organized and independent child and youth workers in urban Bolivia. Different creative approaches will be presented from spontaneous film workshops through collective screenwriting.

Paper long abstract:

The UNATsBO, ‘Union de niños, niñas y adolescentes trabajadores de Bolivia’ represents the Bolivian working children and youth in front of authorities and society for over two decades. The union, divided in regional groups, has been sustained through the help of social workers and organizations through the years. One of these local NGOs gave me the access to members of the movement (called “NATs” – working children and adolescents). Some were more, some were less involved in the political and social processes of making this part of Bolivian society visible.

My role was quickly defined as a facilitator who would bring audio-visual tools into the field. I organized various structured and un-structured workshops and gatherings, with different sized groups, where different forms of video were looked at and produced. During the course of two fieldwork stays (2014 and 2018) I gained a feeling of what functions better for the groups and what the limitations of such participative methods are, especially if the aim is to produce a research output in the form of an ethnographic film.

This paper delineates different approaches and methods to bring videomaking in contexts with little resources, such as the groups of working youth in urban Bolivia: observational filming, interviews, ethno-fiction and co-creation among others. The paper also questions the further stage: the one of transferring the collected knowledge and data into an audio-visual academic publication, with a focus on the strategies of self-representation and resilience among young adolescents while they find their ways into adulthood.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is focused on a collaborative project between an anthropologist, a filmmaker and an archival specialist regarding a documentary film on a threatened indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon. Particular attention is paid to the COVID-19 pandemic, ethnographic narrative and cosmology.

Paper long abstract:

Based on the ethnographic archive's, documents and an interview on anthropological aspects about the Hupd'äh, people who are living in the Northwest of the Amazon, Brazil, a film were completed during this sars-covid19 pandemic time and presents the traditional knowledge of the Hupd'äh extracted from the speeches of three clan chiefs: Bihit, Casi, and Mehtiw. This paper is focused on a collaborative project between an anthropologist, a filmmaker and an archival specialist regarding a documentary film on a threatened indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon. A particular attention was paid to ethnographic information, cosmology narratives and traditional knowledge. This presentation will seek to discuss some issues on the theoretical and methodological aspects related to visual anthropology from the conception to the final production of the film. One of the main issues that will be debated are around the use of photographic, film archives and ethnographic information collected in previous years that come together with a current anthropological analysis to compose the main narrative of the film. This paper is the result of a collaborative work in the realization of the film "The Enchanted Words of the Hupd'äh of the Amazon - Masters of Knowledge Narrated by Renato Athias" who has had done research and documentary films since 1972 about the Hupd'äh, Mina Rad, a French documentary director, has made the film that evoke the unique aspects of the cosmology of this now threatened population and Isabel Castro who have been the film editor, a Paris-based scholar of using archives in fieldwork.