The Handbook of Development Communication and Social Change, First Edition.
Edited by Karin Gwinn Wilkins, Thomas Tufte, and Rafael Obregon.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Video for Change
Tina Askanius
27
Participatory video, radical video, alternative video, community video,
development video, guerrilla video, underground video, advocacy video, DIY
video, subversive video, labor video journalism, video for social change … Over
time and across disciplines and in different political contexts a wide range of
different labels have been used to describe and analyze the ways in which video is
recruited for political purposes by a variety of different actors across the political
spectrum. While there is no shortage of terms to choose from, a clarity and
consistency around the various uses and meanings of these terms is harder to
come across. The term means different things to different people and communities
working with video, be it for use in legal proceedings, video aimed at getting
footage on the international news agenda, video for public screenings, or video
intended for the “imagined” global publics of the web (Gregory 2010).
A certain distinction (and perhaps divorce even) can be found between
theoretical/academic and the more “hands-on” and practice-based definitions of
video activism. In theoretical accounts, video activism is described and examined
as a range of aesthetic forms for political investigation and portrayal. Scholars
within the tradition of political documentary by way of example define radical
film and video with reference to form, subject matter and purpose/intentionality
and isolate the politically committed video for analysis as a discernible type of
media text by looking at the strategies of revelation, exposition, argument, testi-
mony or emotional registers through which video attempts to create change in
its viewers (see, e.g., Corner 2011; Gaines 2007). A more straightforward defini-
tion is offered in some of the practice-oriented literature on the topic. Harding
identifies video “as a tool to bring about social justice and environmental
protection” (Harding 2001: 1). Again from a practitioner’s perspective, Caldwell