Digital Place-makers
A Participatory Video program for experimenting with new media technologies to create empowering narratives.
Contact: Amanda Alencar, pazalencar@eshcc.eur.nl
What is place-making? How do migrants use technology and digital media to make place in new environments? And how could they use that same technology to tell their own place-making stories to inform, inspire and involve both other newcomers and host communities in making a better place?
Digital Place-makers is a Participatory Video program in which participants learn how to use different digital media technologies for visualizing and sharing their perspectives on place-making and belonging while reflecting on ethical technological developments for enhancing newcomers agency through and in the digital.
Throughout six hands-on sessions, participants experiment with both analog (collaging, story-boarding, writing) and digital tools (desktop filming, video-making, photography, voice recording) to co-produce knowledge using their everyday life digital practices as a starting point. Together we created eleven short films that explore how to make a place in the host society, touching on topics like identities, belonging, aspirations, sociabilities, well-being, and livelihood opportunities.
Rotterdam (NL)
January 2021 to March 2022
Participatory Video, place-making, belonging, Rotterdam, filmmaking.
Outcomes of this Project
Short films
Watch the 11 short films that were co-created and produced during the Digital Place-makers program
Research Article
Aspirational place-making and digital practices of refugees in the Netherlands
In review
Key Insights
01
Central to participatory video is the meaningful and active participation by those most affected byan issue. Adopting this approach helped us understand filmmaking and story-telling as tools toempower individuals in sharing their accounts on place-making. Rather than specific guidelines,we focused on providing a broad outline for the creation and curation of content. This allowed par-ticipants to feel in charge of their voice and to make autonomous decisions about the pieces mostrelevant to them in relation to their individual and collective place-making strategies.
02
Placing participants at the center of the process allowed us to address critiques of power imbalances between researcher and researched that are discussed within participatory video methods and that particularly focus on the interference of the researchers and film-makers in the curation of materialin the final films. To safeguard against this pitfall, we not only kept revising and adapting the program on a weekly basis, but we also focused on teaching participants editing skills.
RESEARCH PROJECT BY:
Amanda Alencar (PI)
Camila Sarria Sanz (Researcher)
Emma Verhoeven (Media artist)
Jawer Mawazini (Research consultant)