One of the projects that broke new ground for movements in participatory & social-change film-making was the Challenge for Change program. Created by the Canadian National Film Board in 1967, it ran until 1980 and resulted in over 140 films being made as collaborations between filmmakers and Canadian communities. The Challenge for Change program...
While I was in New Orleans I had the opportunity to meet DJ Invinsible (see her company emergence music for insight into independant hip hop world), who was doing some media training for the new young writers at the Neighborhood Story Project who were about to launch their books. She is a very cool...
The Photo Voice network, based in the UK, has been a force in participatory photography for many years. Bearing the same name as the photovoice method which has been widely used in health and other social research (See WANG, C. & BURRIS, M. (1997) Photovoice: concept, methodology and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education...
This coming Thursday (December 10th 2009) in the Casino Building in City Park, New Orleans, the Neighborhood Story Project will be launching 4 new books written by students (and one recent graduate) of John McDonogh Senior High School. These books have been 2 1/2 years in the making and tell the stories of New...
Most projects that set out to facilitate community participation in the creation of representations – be it for social justice advocacy; health and wellbeing; or cultural documentation – do so with a belief that participation in the making of representations about ones own community or culture can be empowering and re-construct power dynamics and...
I wrote a few weeks ago about projects in the Pacific region that are using participatory visual practices to advocate for social and environmental issues, such as Pacific Black Box addressing displacement due to climate change. In the Middle East – where conflict colours the daily life of everyone and the perceptions of the...
All sorts of interesting collaborative art/social change/community doco work has been going on in various parts of Africa for many years – I recall several years ago at the first 2 Fires Conference in Braidwood NSW (Australia) meeting a woman who had been facilitating participatory art projects with AIDS orphans with fascinating result… HIV...
Check out another project from the Pacific region – this one going on in Papua New Guinea – in a settlement near Port Moresby called 8 Mile. 8 Mile Settlement project is a nice example of an increasingly popular approach to community development – using creative arts (painting, photography, storytelling and traditional weaving) to empower...
This week the AFI (Archivo Fotografico Indigena) came back from a 3 week summer vacation and they have hit the ground running making final preparations for a project they are participating in commissioned by Museo de Mujeres Artistas Méxicanas about diverse experiences of migracion. 5 women associated with AFI have been invited to develop...
In a previous post I mentioned that as part of looking at historical photos of the Kimberley region in the Photo Me project we were given access to images from the Tindale collection, in the form of ring binders with photocopies of hundreds of 3 x 5″ portraits. We were encouraged to show them...