ABSTRACT
By situating debates on the virtues and limitations of practice theory in relation to the specific field of video activism, this chapter inscribes itself into the burgeoning area of scholarship on social movement media practices. First, by synthesizing scholarship on historical and contemporary forms of video activism, I identify three distinct foci in this literature, each adding valuable but essentially isolated insights to the phenomenon by considering video as either or primarily technology, text, or testimony. Based on this review, I then demonstrate how a practice-based approach allows us to appreciate this form of citizen media as not one, but all of these, and puts us in a position to ask holistic questions. Rather than repeating conceptual dichotomies such as online/offline, digital/analogue, old/new, mainstream/activist, a practice-based approach addresses the rich ways in which these categories impinge and encroach on each other. For the purpose of developing such a framework, I draw on the concepts of activist media practices (Mattoni, 2012) and citizen media practices (Stephansen, 2016) as theoretical orientations for further developing an understanding of video activism as the things activists do, think, and say in relation to video for social and political change.
