Indian Space Dreams

This feature-length documentary is an ethnographic practice-research project about representation, place and identity. The geographical context for this practice was the southern-most tip of Mumbai where, at a space research centre, astrophysicists were designing and building instruments for India’s first astronomical satellite. In the West, the dominant discourse questions whether space research can be justified in a developing country with high levels of poverty. So when one of the space scientists invited me to film his science class with the children in the slum next door to the Space Research Centre, this presented an opportunity to explore this juxtaposition and contrast. The film intercuts these two worlds, separated by a wall, to question notions of outer space above and spaces here on earth

Locating a "third voice": participatory filmmaking and the everyday in rural India

This article reflects on practice-led research involving a community video project in southern India. The filmmaker also asked four of the women in this project if they would use their cameras to film their everyday lives. In the early 1980s, Barbara Myerhoff mentioned in a conference panel session the concept of a ‘third voice’ created through participatory research, when the ethnographer’s and the subjects’ contributions are edited together in such a way to form a new perspective [Kaminsky, M. 1992. “Myerhoff’s ‘Third Voice’: Ideology and Genre in Ethnographic Narrative.” Social Text 33: 124–144 (127)]. In this article, the filmmaker discusses how she used participatory and observational documentary techniques and ‘video diary interviews’, to produce five different sources of footage ‘blended in such a manner as to make it impossible to discern which voice dominates the work…films where outsider and insider visions coalesce’ [Ruby, J. 1991. “Speaking for, Speaking About, Speaking With, or Speaking Alongside: an Anthropological and Documentary Dilemma.” Visual Anthropology Review 7 (2): 50–67 (62)]. This article examines the challenges of working in this way and considers whether this technique of filmmaking can reveal new knowledge about the everyday lives of four particular women living in rural Andhra Pradesh

Village Tales: an exploration of he potential of participatory documentary filmmaking in rural India.

This is a PhD by practice, consisting of a documentary film, Village Tales, and an accompanying thesis; I locate my practice in the context of documentary and participatory filmmaking. In this research I want, as an experienced documentary filmmaker, to bring together the techniques of both ethnographic and participatory filmmaking, with approaches used in documentary production. The former with its emphasis on the voice of, in this case, rural women in India, and the latter with its concern to engage an audience through narrative and imagery. The research question is ‘to what extent can a combination of observational documentary techniques, video diaries and participatory filmmaking methods be used to explore the interior and everyday lives of women from another culture?’ The thesis covers the period of time from 2008 to 2014, which includes research, filmmaking, scripting, editing and screening the documentary to different audiences. The documentary explores what the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) calls ‘dailiness’; that is, films built around the exploration of relationships, feelings and experiences. Leslie Devereaux uses the term ‘sticking close to experience’ when describing this attention to everyday life (1995:72). My documentary is situated in the everyday because the women work primarily as housewives and mothers and the ‘everyday’ is an important site for the construction, maintenance and challenging of gender roles and power. More specifically, Village Tales is concerned with a regional government community initiative in rural India, set up to train local women as video reporters so they can make films about subjects important to them; these films are then screened to other villagers to raise community awareness. However, my documentary is also about some of these women’s daily lives as I asked four of them if they would turn their cameras on to their everyday lives and make video diaries about their own personal concerns. The exegesis charts the creative and intellectual terrain that the documentary project as a whole explores. It includes an historical account of participatory filmmaking in the developing world and the use of video diaries, by broadcast television in the UK. I ask that the accompanying DVD is watched after reading Chapters 1-3 of the thesis

Visualising the Everyday: participatory filmmaking in rural India

Participatory visual research methods are increasingly used as a way to generate new forms of knowledge and to decrease the power differential between the researcher and researched. In this article, the author, who is both a documentary filmmaker and academic, draws upon her research experience working with a group of women filmmakers in Andhra Pradesh in southern India. She filmed the women as they made their own film, but also asked four of them if they would use their cameras to film their everyday lives. Some of the women chose to challenge their husbands from behind the camera, while others in the group spoke openly about their lives in video diary interviews. This way of working generated five different sources of footage, which were edited together to form a coherent narrative and create a ‘third voice’. The author discusses her findings and what she learnt from this process and considers the strengths and limitations of this form of research

Hunger by the Sea: Partnerships in The Brave Third Space.

In this article, co-authored by two undergraduate students (one international) and two academics in a media faculty of a post-92 university (e.g., Polytechnic), in England, we share the findings and offer a reflexive lens on the process of a media practice education collaboration in the community, through the co-production of the animated film Hunger by the Sea: https://vimeo.com/234840520 . The contributors to this research are media practice academics, media and journalism students from related but distinct disciplines, and the users and providers of a food bank on the English coast. The food bank users and providers have not been involved in this writing, but their voices are (literally) heard in the project’s primary outcome—the animated film. In this article, we articulate reflections on how the project, in bringing together academics, students, and community participants in a challenging but rich space, enabled exchanges of expertise and new, boundary-crossing ways of being in education that can be discussed as “third space” interactions

Donning the ‘slow professor’: A feminist action research project

Corporatization of Higher Education has introduced new performance measurements as well as an acceleration of academic tasks creating working environments characterised by speed, pressure and stress. This paper discusses findings from a qualitative, feminist participatory action research (PAR) study undertaken by an interdisciplinary team of women academics at a modern, corporate university in England. The study illuminates how corporatized HE erodes faculty autonomy, degrades learning environments, damages professional satisfaction and health. Strategies for resistance and liberation developed through the PAR process are discussed

‘Welcome to the Machine!’ Resisting isomorphic, masculinised corporatisation of Higher Education through feminist scholarship

This paper discusses the synthesised findings from two interdisciplinary, feminist studies conducted under the auspices of the non-corporate nexus, the Women’s Academic Network at Bournemouth University, UK, of which the main author is a co-convenor and co-founder. These qualitative studies focus on academic women’s experiences of managing careers in the work culture of corporate Institutions of Higher Education (HEI) in a modern UK university. The background to this work draws from a body of international research into the slower career progression rates of women academics in comparison to male counterparts and gendered barriers the former encounter. While there has encouragement within Higher Education bodies across the EU to balance out the current gendered inequities within academia, our findings indicate that these are woven into the institutional fabric of enacted daily academic practices serving to disadvantage women scholars