ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects upon an arts-based development project that the authors have been working on in South Africa since 2016, and in particular its use of ‘Participatory Video’ (PV). They explore the ways in which the competing priorities of the various stakeholders involved in the project have had to be reconciled with the project’s ethical commitment to the prioritisation of voice, a process that has forced all those involved to fundamentally rethink their initial assumptions. While such projects invariably make claims for PV as a particularly effective method for ‘giving’ communities ‘voice’, however patronising such a formulation might be, very little space is generally given to the exploration of the films produced in such projects, that is, the specific articulation of this ‘voice’. Thus, this chapter also seeks to challenge a trend in the analysis of such practice that focuses entirely on questions of methodology and an understanding of PV as a process, largely ignoring the products made
