Between Potential and Reality: negotiating participatory visual

processes towards community emergence

Jacqueline Shaw, Graham Jeffery and Kerrie Schaefer

(apols for absence!)

From ground level insight to global policy influence

• UN Post-2015 context - Participate research initiative

• Visual methods programme - participatory video, DST and Photovoice used to drive community-led action research processes in 10 countries

• Overall, insight on relational processes needed to shift power dynamics that prevent sustainable change

Intro to Remaking Society project

Community emergence

• This conference has identified place-based and identity-based community

• Community not static object to be serviced

• Dynamic, emerging• Created and negotiated through

processes (often tension-filled)• Tensions are generative

‘Community’ – problematic conceptIn this study we drew on a ‘dynamic’ notion of community, articulated by Prof. David Watt after the programme for community arts that Kelly went on to define via the British Socialist critical tradition, and Shelton Trust’s manifesto on cultural democracy (1986). According to Watt:

“Static notions of community are seen as impositions, usually categorisations, by a dominant culture concerned to maintain itself as monolithic by exercising its power to define and subsume subgroups. Dynamic notions of community … allow the creation of purposive communities of interest which, by the process of self-definition, resist being thus subsumed and can retain an oppositional integrity. This autonomy introduces the possibility of internal negotiation as a basic mode of social interaction, and they are consequently potentially democratic and alterable. The commitment to democracy as a principle is then seen as leading to the possibility of broad alliances between autonomous groups working to undermine the dominant culture through an insistence on common access to the process of creating meaning and value within the culture” (1991: 64).

The practice realities in context

• Idealistic framing – tendency for optimistic discussion of general perceived potential that can result –rather than how, for whom and in what circumstances

• Call for evaluation of social impact – tendency to focus on individual rather than collective gains

• Contested context between policy and practice intentions, across existing divides and agencies

What are the key tensions between

possibility and constraint?

e.g Practice happens on continuum between

boundaries ENABLERStructured process- separating internal and external

Public voiceSpeaking up

POSSIBILITYBeing heard PRACTICE

TENSIONRisk of exposure

Public silence Keeping quiet

HINDRANCEPressure due to short timeframeor external expectation

Extended participatory process• Group forming and

building – safe space• Group level (internal) exploration and reflectionHow change can happen and what prevents it?• Horizontal level dialogue• From issues to solutions • - and the barriers? • Across community dialogue• Vertical dialogue

Films

Adapted from Shaw 2012:135-6

Process Possibilities

Linked practice tensions

Establishing collaborative dynamics – shifting power imbalance

• Within community dynamics – avoiding take-over by most influential when negotiating between individual/group/wider needs

Developing voice through group interaction

• Ethics of public exposure – encouraging open expression versus risk of inappropriate exposure and backlash

Towards community-driven development

• Whose agenda? – external commissioning influence versus practitioner’s intentions/group interests

• Tendency for policy/research agenda to frame thus close down possibilities

Deepening contextual understanding

• From community-identified issues to community-led solutions

• Superficiality versus deeper critical insight• Learning through action versus static understanding

Evolving social influence • Ongoing conversation versus consultation• Opening pathways versus opposing barriers/lack of

long-term support• Bridge building versus entrenching difference

More infoRemaking Society film https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrBgT51cz18

Remaking Society twitter feed www.twitter.com/remakingsocietyParticipate Documentary http

://real-time.org.uk/case-study/work-us

Online exhibition http://www.workwithus2015.org 

Real Time www.real-time.org.uk

Email - info@real-time.org.uk jackie-

shaw@btconnect.com