ABSTRACT
There has been an explosion of interest in participatory media as a tool for individual and community education and development across the globe, from digital storytelling programs in urban centers in North America to media projects tied to liberation struggles throughout the developing world (Hartley and McWilliam 2009; Milne et al. 2012). Relatively inexpensive
digital video cameras and editing software have dramatically democratized video and multimedia production, opening up unprecedented possibilities for self-representation and political engagement through a multimodal medium that brings together image, sound, and text. However, the fluorescence of projects has not been accompanied by as extensive a research literature; much of the writing consists of program evaluation reports. Moreover, these projects are rarely examined in relation to one another. Consequently, there has been no sustained comparative analysis of the methods and products of various community media organizations in different contexts. There is thus a lack of academic understanding of why such projects may or may not be of significance to the participants and of what kinds of teaching and learning happen in these sites.
