An innovative Action Aid-supplied project in Nepal has seen women's empowerment make rapid progress through the use of video discussions about climate change. In this exploration of the project, we ask what we can learn from the use of such technology, and consider the implications for international development agencies and their efforts to support women's rights.
Scholars have long argued that all citizens raising their voices to participate in decisionmaking as well as challenging injustice, enhances democracy. In turn, governments who are more accountable to their citizens and able to respond to multiple voices, foster civil, equitable societies. With this ethos, strengthening the voice of people living in poverty and marginalisation has become a vital part of global poverty-reduction goals. In this environment, international development institutions are increasingly seeking ways to use participatory media processes to raise citizen voice. Here, participatory video (PV) stands out as an attractive communication for development (C4D) approach. Practitioners who facilitate PV processes often promote the methodology as intrinsically empowering as it amplifies the voice of citizens often excluded from mainstream decision-making spaces. In this way, PV practice embodies both the glamour of filmmaking and a compelling narrative as a community-driven process.Through an often-evangelised discourse, a predominant assumption is that the grassroots, collaborative filmmaking process naturally leads to transformative social and/or political change. The non-critical conclusion, however, is on a slippery slope in its ideological claim. In practice, transformative change with PV is far from absolute-especially when seeking significant response to the systemic injustices PV participants often face.Accordingly, more research is required into how PV practice might sufficiently raise citizen voice when situated in international development contexts. The resulting knowledge can help PV practitioners navigate complex development environments that hold potential to either enable or diminish the voices of society's most vulnerable citizens.This thesis offers a study on the nuanced understandings of and the interplay between PV, citizen voice and international development. The study investigates contemporary PV practitioners' conceptualisations of the phenomenon of using PV to raise citizen voice in international development contexts. The study participants were 25 global PV practitioners who had experience on more than 650 PV projects. Of those projects, approximately 250 specifically aimed to raise the voice of excluded groups in international development contexts. Through investigating the PV practitioners' perceptions of the phenomenon, the study identified three distinct epistemologies relevant to PV practice and raising citizen voice. The study called these the amplified, engaged and equitable voice pathways.
Page iiiMaking the three categories explicit is of critical value to the PV field. They provide a language and theoretical grounding for why certain PV approaches may be more effective than others for social and/or political change. Of the three pathways, the research ultimately deemed equitable voice as the most viable for citizen voice to be both authentically representative and respectively valued in decision-making spaces. Accordingly, the study drew from scholarship and...
Youth-Creative Action Research (Y-CAR) is a variant of participatory action research specifically suited for exploring and developing evidence-informed innovations to address complex social challenges such as climate change. In this paper, we present an overview of Y-CAR and explore its core defining features, potential for application in research and action, and connection to other actionoriented research methodologies. We draw on a range of examples of this emergent methodology that illustrates its evolution and core principles in action and show how it has been implemented in research. We conclude the paper by examining key learnings, future leverage points, and limitations to applying Y-CAR in practice.
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