Whose Media? Action Research for Participatory Representation: Some Thoughts on Work in Progress

This paper reports on a research project being conducted by ActionAid in Malawi and Sierra Leone to examine ways that local communities can be enabled to negotiate, manage and monitor their own development through the use of video. It explores the experience of using participatory video among largely illiterate populations. The process involves training teams of local development (ActionAid) workers to facilitate residents of villages and townships to use video recordings within their own communities, to document, analyse and problem solve, and externally, to build alliances with other communities and to negotiate with local and national government, and donors.

The paper analyses ways that development workers can facilitate residents to engage in negotiations with policy makers for their own development. It is concerned with micro-macro level representation and response. The purpose of the methodology employed is to "break through the isolation of largely illiterate resource-poor communities and to help them to move into the public sphere of representation and negotiation."

Objectives of the research:

• find ways that resource-poor communities can research, analyse and represent their own needs and priorities to policymakers and service providers and monitor responses
• explore the use of video as a non-literacy based tool that can beshaped and produced by resource poor people
• extend participation and uses made of the methodologies bylocal groups
• monitor any changes produced over the research period (threeyears) in the communication habits of an international NGO.
• monitor learning and changes in local and national governmentpolicies and approaches in areas effected by the Action Research

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