Are We Using the Practitioner Community’s Potential for Collective Reflection? A Phenomenography of Participatory Video Theories of Practice

Abstract: This thesis systematically captures participatory video practitioners’ reflections on their role to examine variations in practitioners’ conceptions of participatory video practice by examining the internal coherence and collective learning interaction of the community of practitioners. This is a relevant area of research in the field of development studies because it stimulates reflection and helps the evaluation of prevailing participatory development approaches, allowing for collective practice improvement, maximizing potentials, and minimizing risks. Participatory video (PV) is a facilitated group process of media production. The interest in, funding for and number of PV projects in development is growing, due to its celebrated ideological potential to bring social change, to identify community needs and empower marginalized groups. However, the mainstreaming of participatory approaches to development has triggered a wave of admonitions about ethical, institutional, and personal challenges that these contain. In its wake has a previously uncritical focus on PV’s potentials recently led a group of scholar practitioners to engage in reflecting on their ideology, practice realities and tensions in their role. The thesis contributes original knowledge to the scholarly discourse by collectivizing information on a wider group of PV practitioners. The research drew on existing scholarly work abductively to develop an interview guide, then qualitative data was first collected in semi-structured interviews to gain a fine-grained view on the practitioner community’s reflections. In a second phase of primary data collection, practitioners were given the opportunity to collectively discuss the preliminary findings in an online workshop. The research uses a phenomenographic categorization to group practitioners’ conceptualizations and Wenger’s community of practice concept (1998) as analytical framework. It finds five distinctive practitioner roles; the Activists, Collaborators, Educators, Organizers and Safe-keepers which emphasize different parts of practice to different extents. It further finds that a community of practice does not exist between PV practitioners due to both a lack of quantity and quality of interaction and significant divisions between practitioner subgroups and gives recommendations on how to enhance mutual learning and collective reflection in the future.