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Edited by Shirley A. White. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003. 412 pp. ISBN 0761997636.
The area of "participatory video" is both a good fit for and a distant project of many communication scholars. Today, the idea of "participatory" research still presents a major hot button for many social scientists. But it is in describing the power of and process of participatory communication in development work that this volume is successful. In Participatory Video: Images that Transform and Empower, Shirley White has collected essays that report on the work of numerous individuals and organizations that use video to bring about change in the context of "development" practice.
The types of change addressed in the book are both incremental and large scale, though all are generally tied to grand projects of social and economic change through the purview of "development studies." The authors in the text describe ways in which participatory video can be used to encourage change in both attitudes and social behaviour in an attempt to solicit the participation of communities to identify development solutions that are within their reach. The change addressed in the book, however, tends to concentrate on changing the ways in which members of the community engage in the development process in an effort to make their needs, wishes, and material realities known to the "outside" forces of development. On this level, the book is both successful and limited.
While the book takes into account a wide range of approaches for using video to transform people, relationships, perceptions, and understandings, it privileges the idea of community participation almost exclusively in the work of development. The contributors recount their experiences based on intensive field-research projects, and comment on...