Story systems: the potential of transmedia storytelling as material embodiment of a collective enactment of place and identity

The ideas raised in this chapter initially emer- ged over the course of conceiving and creating the acc- laimed multi-year, transmedia Big Stories, Small Towns participatory documentary project (bigstories.com.au). The project has facilitated the telling, recording, archiving and dissemination of over 500 intimate auto/biographical narratives across thirteen towns in six countries to over 1 million viewers. The project was initiated in 2008 with the belief that every community has a living memory and co- llective identity woven together from a thousand stories. Recognising the intrinsic value of telling and documenting stories – with the active involvement of participants using a variety of media and technologies – reveals emergent and complex processes. The inter-twined combination of con- text, process, form and relationships heightened throu- gh the use of technology is a complex adaptive system. While a level of interconnectivity has always underpinned storytelling within communities, shifting global dynamics and new mediums allow for an alternative examination of multi-layered communities and the complex relations between people, social backgrounds, technology/ media and place. This represents a fundamental shift away from a centralised vision of storymaking (i.e. author/documen- ter-centric). Thus, this chapter moves attention from the rhetoric of texts to practices of community organisation and technological and embodied material relations, both of which aspire to produce a collectively enacted sense of place and identity

The floating cinema: environmental education documentaries

The Floating Cinema was a participatory media for environmental education research project run as part of an environmental awareness program for the floating communities of Tonle Sap. The Tonle Sap is the largest freshwater lake in South East Asia and the biggest inland fishery in the world. There are over 1 million people living in floating settlements on the lake whose livelihoods are totally dependent on the productivity of the lake and over 3 million additional people mostly dependent on the lake (Ratner et. al., 2017). This productivity is increasingly reliant on complex integrated water management with diverse stakeholders across the Mekong basin (Keskinen, 2006). The Floating Cinema was part of an environmental education and awareness program run by the Cambodian-French non-government organisation Osmose. Supported by the Spanish NGO Asociacion Solidaria Andaluza De Desarrollo (ASAD), Osmose implemented a reform of their environmental education and awareness program from mid-2010. The previous model of environmental education developed by Osmose in 2002 was adapted to respond to pressing contemporary issues such as overfishing, hydroelectric construction on the Mekong and climate change. In addition, curriculum was developed for a wider age range, including an adult education program. There was also a focus on creating broader impact beyond direct participants in the program with a hope to transmit key messages from the program across the villages as a whole and potentially to other floating settlements. Participatory videos are an accessible tool to approach certain issues with the community in order to enable them become creatively engaged in producing stories that reflect on issues and solutions to local problems. In the videos produced for this research project, the environment plays the leading role, while children and adults who have participated in the education and awareness program are the creative team. Along with teachers, participants developed a message and a creative treatment of this message. The result was a series of participatory videos in which community people talk about some of the most pressing environmental issues in their village. The program began with a 2-week training in two villages in April 2011, continued over the course of the semester with classes developing their own scripts and a final 2 week facilitated production process in June. Videos were edited in Phnom Penh and sent to communities for feedback and approval, prior to completion and screenings from August. This model was inspired by the Fogo Process, run by filmmakers working with National Film Board of Canada and Memorial University in Newfoundland in 1966 on Fogo Island (as detailed in Potter (2012, 2014). As with Fogo, the floating villages face a range of complex environmental and social issues. There was little connectivity between the villages due to distance, no mains electricity and no local communications such as telephones or radio. However, many issues were shared and needed to be addressed collectively. Developing locally relevant information that could bridge these gaps and build a sense of collective identity was also important. The participatory video process supported villagers to describe local issues in their own way, to communicate that local concern between villages and ultimately to share that concern through the videos with a wider population

Participatory Media in Cambodia: an exploration of relational film, documentary and art

[Extract] With the financial support of Asialink in 2012 and additional support from the Ian Potter Cultural Trust and the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) fund, and in-kind support from the Bophana Centre in Phnom Penh I was able to return to Cambodia to work with independent Khmer artists and filmmakers who are pushing the boundaries of creative self expression and exploring new forms of articulating their culture for Cambodian and international audiences. With a long history of violent repression of media and independent, creative self-expression Cambodia has struggled to re-capture the extraordinary cultural capital that blossomed in the 1960s before war, the Khmer Rouge and more than 20 years of political instability destroyed the vibrancy of both traditional and contemporary Cambodian art and culture. Access to and interest in all aspects of media and screen culture is expanding rapidly, but is hampered by a lack of opportunities that encourage participation and cultural and governmental censorship. My residency sought to build on more two and a half years work in using media and art for development in the Cambodian context. I had moved to Cambodia in 2009 and returned to Australia in mid 2011. During that time I worked across a variety of participatory media projects for UN agencies, international NGOs and produced digital media projects with the support of media institutions including National Film Board of Canada, EU Media and Screen Australia. Much of my work focused on working with emerging filmmakers and artists -young people under 30 who are expanding conservative views of Cambodian culture and history and seeking to define their identities beyond the tragedies of the past 40 years. The majority of this work was concerned with exploring new platforms for creative expression with the use of online a focus. In addition a focus was on building or supporting collective, creative endeavours and structures. Over the course of this work I have developed a series of close relationships with some inspiring individuals and collectives - some of whom will be profiled in this report - and who were key creative collaborators on the variety of projects undertaken. Whilst a large amount of content was produced over the course of the residency, and structures were put in place for continued creativity beyond the scope of the residency, I believe that consolidating these relationships with key collaborators has been the most important outcome of the residency

Participatory Media in Cambodia: an exploration of relational film, documentary and art

[Extract] With the financial support of Asialink in 2012 and additional support from the Ian Potter Cultural Trust and the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) fund, and in-kind support from the Bophana Centre in Phnom Penh I was able to return to Cambodia to work with independent Khmer artists and filmmakers who are pushing the boundaries of creative self expression and exploring new forms of articulating their culture for Cambodian and international audiences. With a long history of violent repression of media and independent, creative self-expression Cambodia has struggled to re-capture the extraordinary cultural capital that blossomed in the 1960s before war, the Khmer Rouge and more than 20 years of political instability destroyed the vibrancy of both traditional and contemporary Cambodian art and culture. Access to and interest in all aspects of media and screen culture is expanding rapidly, but is hampered by a lack of opportunities that encourage participation and cultural and governmental censorship. My residency sought to build on more two and a half years work in using media and art for development in the Cambodian context. I had moved to Cambodia in 2009 and returned to Australia in mid 2011. During that time I worked across a variety of participatory media projects for UN agencies, international NGOs and produced digital media projects with the support of media institutions including National Film Board of Canada, EU Media and Screen Australia. Much of my work focused on working with emerging filmmakers and artists -young people under 30 who are expanding conservative views of Cambodian culture and history and seeking to define their identities beyond the tragedies of the past 40 years. The majority of this work was concerned with exploring new platforms for creative expression with the use of online a focus. In addition a focus was on building or supporting collective, creative endeavours and structures. Over the course of this work I have developed a series of close relationships with some inspiring individuals and collectives - some of whom will be profiled in this report - and who were key creative collaborators on the variety of projects undertaken. Whilst a large amount of content was produced over the course of the residency, and structures were put in place for continued creativity beyond the scope of the residency, I believe that consolidating these relationships with key collaborators has been the most important outcome of the residency

Edges of Identity: The Production of Neoliberal Subjectivities

In recent decades neoliberalism has emerged as the ruling economic, political and cultural ideology of our time. Originally construed as an economic philosophy, neoliberalism is better understood today as a broad world view that emphasises free-market policies, deregulation, individualism, self-management and personal resilience at the expense of more collective, social-democratic policies and principles. Neoliberalism is a pervasive ideology that has shaped our lives for more than 40 years, from the wide-ranging organisational structures of our global economy to our most intimate bodily practices. In this engaging and accessible volume, Jonathon Louth and Martin Potter bring together researchers working in and across Europe, Asia, Australia and North America to elucidate on the manifold ways in which neoliberalism produces our subjectivities. Taking in nations and citizenship, urban transformation, gender, work, (dis)ability, sexual performance and cognitive function, this volume demonstrates the astonishing scope of neoliberalism to inform and delimit our identities on both macro and micro levels of social and personal life. Combining thoughtful theoretical accounts with fascinating fieldwork and spanning areas of inquiry including the UK, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Pakistan, Cambodia, Japan and Australia, Edges of Identity provides a remarkable collection of global perspectives on the impact of neoliberalism in contemporary international contexts. This tenth volume in the Issues in the Social Sciences series is an absorbing introduction to the practical affects and lived realities of neoliberal ideology that will appeal both to readers encountering neoliberalism for the first time and expert scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Saving the White Building: storytelling and the production of space

The White Building is an apartment complex in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It was built in 1963 as a keystone of the Sihanouk governments' urban social housing scheme. After the fall of Khmer Rouge in 1979, the few surviving artists were called to live in The White Building due to its proximity to the National Theatre in order to re-build Khmer culture (the National Theatre has since been demolished). After decades of no maintenance and ongoing restructuring of the exterior, the White Building is in poor condition. However, behind the fading facade and dilapidated infrastructure there lives a complex community of over three thousand people including artists, musicians, community activists and everyday city dwellers. This paper explores the role of recent projects to document the everyday lives of the Building's inhabitants as both a means of resistance and to enable critical reflexivity among participants. Through the development of a number of initiatives across a variety of mediums and media platforms including the very successful Humans of Phnom Penh series, whitebuilding.org and the Sa Sa Art Projects artists' collective based in the building there is a desire to not only celebrate and document the living memory of this unique community, but to push back against government and property developers' interest in the site. By utilising a Lefebvrian analysis we argue, first, that the dominant discursive acts of the more powerful can be challenged through the expression of the 'lived' and the elevation of everyday life. And, second, we argue that the very perception of the space and the sense of place is (re)produced through these interactions across these new and diverse mediascapes

Big stories, small towns: Banlung, Ratanakiri, Cambodia

Big Stories: Banlung was an experiment in participatory media interfacing with a global platform for showcasing community stories in a development setting, coupled with a detailed review (in Potter, 2014). The project sought to work with local communities and people to highlight stories of change in the area around Banlung and the impact on ethnic minority groups in terms of losing land, language and culture. The work was also an attempt to add to both the practice and literature of participatory processes in the field of Communication for Development which many (e.g. Lie and Mandler, 2009) observe is under-reviewed. The work was produced in collaboration between Australian and Cambodian filmmakers, two local content producers from Tampuon and Kreung ethnic minorities, two Tampuon communities and a community based NGO Non Timber Forest Products. We addressed issues of how Tampuon communities were seeking to sustain their community in the face of change. 27 short documentaries were produced and multiple other media including photo essays and a standalone website on the Big Stories, Small Towns platform: http://bigstories.com.au/towns/banlun

Big stories, small towns: Bongkud-Namaus, Sabah, Malaysia

Big Stories, Small Towns is a transmedia documentary project (www.bigstories.com.au). The project seeks to describe multi-layered communities and explore complex relations between people, social backgrounds, technology and place. The project is based around filmmakers living in residence in a small town and creating stories focussed on local people caring for and creating their community. Since 2008 residencies have been undertaken in 13 towns – mainly in Australia and the Asia Pacific. In 2014 and 2015 the Big Stories team led by Martin Potter and Sabahan filmmaker Nadira Ilana ran film and photography workshops in Kampung Bongkud (Bongkud Village). Bongkud and Namaus Villages are in the Raunau district in Sabah, Malaysia approximately 140 km from the state's capital city of Kota Kinabalu and 20km from Mount Kinabalu. Bongkud-Namaus is an ethnic Dusun community that is predominantly Christian with a Muslim minority. The primary language spoken is a Ranau dialect of Dusun. The two villages bonded in the 1970s when villagers from Namaus moved over to Bongkud Village in need of farmlands. The villagers of Bongkud and Namaus are mostly involved with agriculture - subsistence farming, palm oil and market gardens. Some locals work for Camp Bongkud, a subsidiary of Camps International, a UK-based voluntourism company. The Big Stories team assisted locals in producing films and images with a focus on their Dusun heritage, relationships and dreams. The world premiere for Big Stories in Bongkud-Namaus took place on the 12th of March 2016 in Bongkud Village and was an all day cultural celebration of Dusun culture, which saw over 1,000 people attend. The project released a Malaysia specific domain: www.bigstories.com.my - the first Big Stories Co. town to receive its own country specific domain. Between June 2016 and November 2016 there were over 30,000 visits to the Big Stories site. Through other media coverage over 400,000 people were made aware of the project including over 100,000 views of this video produced by r.age Malaysia: http://rage.com.my/sabah-stories/ Through the Big Stories social media through festival and conference presentations (such as Freedom Film Festival, August 2016, Borneo Eco Film Festival, October 2016 and the Georgetown Literary Festival, November, 2016) resulted in additional visibility of the research. Selection of the stories in these competitive festivals is further evidence of research excellence

Art as Spatial Resistance in Phnom Penh, Cambodia: the production of emotional belonging in the White Building

The White Building in central Phnom Penh was built in 1963 as part of a modernist vision of social housing for artists and performers. Following the trauma of the Khmer Rouge, where the city was emptied and an estimated ninety percent of Cambodia's artists were killed, the intervening Vietnamese-backed government sought to repopulate the building with an invitation to surviving artists to return. In recent years, largely due to government neglect, the building has fallen into disrepair. Many residents within the building are still artists and performers, but the community is often disparaged by government and segments of the press as a slum populated by criminals and sex workers. Since the mid-2000s, the building has been under constant threat of demolition by developers backed by the Cambodian government, replicating similar land-grabbing episodes that have occurred across the city as part of a violent neoliberal spatial reckoning. Within this context, we utilise a Lefebvrian lens to chart the history of the Building from the late 1950s, before focusing on art and storytelling programs from 2008 to the present. We trace the upsurge in artistic endeavours within the building and how they have become a way of articulating pluralistic modes of struggle for a diverse range of residents. With access to documentary footage of residents within the Building, shot by members of a White Building collective, we explore the emotional sense of belonging and emergent forms of resistance co-constituted by their connection to this urban space and surrounding street life. From this perspective, we argue that the dominant discursive acts of the more powerful can and have been challenged through the expression of the 'lived' and the elevation of everyday life. Furthermore, we argue that the very perception of space and the sense of emotional belonging that occurs within it can and has been (re)produced through these alternative interactions

Big Stories, Small Towns: Asia Pacific (Australia)

Big Stories Small Towns is a collaborative transmedia process driven documentary project. The project generates stories with and by local community members using a mixed methods and these stories are then disseminated via a range of media. The project ‘tagline’ is “Local Stories with Global Impact”. To that end, the aim of the Big Stories project in this iteration was to scale the work across Australia and the Asia Pacific to build a diverse and inspiring global portrait of country life. This research spans the three residencies across Australia, starting in late 2013 and completed in 2016 in the towns of Cowra (New South Wales), Coober Pedy (South Australia) and Queenstown (Tasmania). The aim of the work was to explore mechanisms for remote co-creation with fellow filmmakers who could then translate the process of the Big Stories project into their communities and deliver stories to the online platform of bigstories.com.au. A key question underpinning research was - can you have a good process and a an impactful outcome simultaneously? So, is it possible to have a participatory production process, community ownership of stories as well as high-quality media products and sizeable audiences? Previous iterations of the Big Stories project had explored questions around effective techniques for practitioners developing and delivering facilitated participatory digital media projects. In developing this iteration, key influences were Freire’s (1970, pp. 88- 91) understanding of dialogical practice and the necessary values of love, hope, humility, faith in others’ capability and critical thinking from which this practice might arise. This influence is explicitly quoted in the Big Stories Briefing document. Also, the concept of Positive Deviance, after Unger’s (1987) Negative Capability, which allows for human agency within the formative contexts of institutional and ideological structures, has been influential and is seen in the framing described in the Briefing as “shining a light on people who care for and create their community.” In addition the concept of agonistic pluralism outlined by Mouffe (2000) that shifts attention from achieving to consensus and focusses instead on creating space for multiple, often conflicted opinions and Ivan Illich’s (1979) vision of the shift from a technocratic elite towards “convivial tools” developed and maintained by a community of users provide overarching theoretical frameworks for the project as a whole. As process-driven participatory media projects reach broadcast scale and quality, more intimate and nuanced understandings of both co-creative processes and the values of production are needed. My work in the project focusses on the impact of participation in media making and sharing on individuals, communities and societies. I provide facilitation and resources, working models and evidence of need and impact that supports sustained participation of marginalized communities in creative practices. As creative director and producer of the project I defined the process and principles of production. Along with co-producer Anna Grieve I resourced the project – initially with $220,000 Screen Australia funding and then subsequent funding support through local and state agencies for each residency once filmmakers and towns were identified. Once funding, a briefing document and funding templates had been formulated, filmmakers across Australia were selected based on an understanding of producing both high quality documentaries and participatory media works. Towns were then selected by the filmmakers in each state. Additional fundraising then took place at local and state levels to support residencies in each state. Filmmakers were designated the intellectual property ownership of the stories they produced and were encouraged to share this ownership with participants in the story and to use creative commons licensing. The Big Stories project requested a flexible license from the filmmakers and participants to transmit their stories in various settings. At the same time as residencies were in play I worked with Portable Studios on a content and marketing strategy to increase audience. This audience development work resulted in 130,369 views from 2013 (~2000 views per month). There was little increase in visits to the site as a result of this work. Portable also supported the project through social media posts with the Big Stories Facebook page receiving a 5x increase in likes (from ~500 likes to over 2500). However, overall this was not an effective driver of audiences to the bigstories.com.au website