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.