The effort to address persistent epistemological inequalities within research on African realities has given rise to questions of shared knowledge production and ways to build more inclusive research. To respond to the challenge of decolonizing social science research, scholars have turned to participatory audiovisual methods. Beyond that, these approaches allow us to address the methodological challenges of connecting to the immediacy of human experience in an affective and often non-verbal and immersive manner. Studying aspects of embodied experience that are rooted in people’s immediate relationships with tangible or intangible worlds often poses challenges for traditional qualitative social science methods and requires approaches that go beyond the confines of discourse. Seeking to identify “new empathetic routes through which to broker everyday knowledge” (Pink 2011, 451), participatory audiovisual methods can help to awaken otherwise hazy memories, as well as illustrate and communicate this past to an outside observer. This panel sets out to explore this intersection between audiovisual anthropology, participatory research approaches and the study of tangible and intangible in postcolonial Africa.
Participatory audiovisual methods require active engagement, and lend themselves to co-creation, thereby helping to relax hierarchies in contexts of power inequalities—a challenge encountered by many outside ethnographers. Followed responsibly, such methods can help communities to assume control over their narratives: expressing priorities and affects through their own gaze and using their own voice. Oftentimes, the process of co-production is no less important and edifying as the final products: at their best, the lab-like environment of training workshops and elicitation sessions can have added benefits for the communities (e.g., by honing skills and opening new avenues of co-creation) and for the researcher (e.g., by informing them about social power dynamics and priorities).
Audiovisual media, that enable us to grasp and convey affects through sound and visual images, have become an important stimulus to prompt people’s own stories and perspectives. Given the potential of these tools for sensory anthropology more broadly (Pink 2006), we therefore ask how audiovisual methods can help to understand the experience of places as mediated through the senses? We invite contributions that speak to the question of how engaging with the realms of sound and image can enable both researcher and participants to evoke various meanings, experiences and emotions (Glaw et al. 2017).
We are particularly interested in the participatory potential and application of audiovisual tools, as they have been shown to offer creative ways of involving interlocutors. By engaging in participatory audio-visual research, authors have developed the idea of “shared authority” (Bodenstein and Waldburger 2021). In this way, participatory research approaches challenge historically entrenched power dynamics, allowing concerned communities in postcolonial settings to take greater ownership of the research process (Pauwels 2015). In the following we outline the concrete methodological approaches that we consider relevant to the challenges described above. However, other methods along these lines are welcome.
Participatory photography and videography (Cumming and Norwood 2012) have been applied within various academic disciplines to enable participants to better control their narratives and perspectives (Latz 2017). Such methods, such as photo voice (Gubrium and Harper 2016, McLees 2013), bring forth questions around the authority of who gets to picture whom, requiring the researcher to relinquish control of the camera. It may therefore function as a postcolonial tool to counteract stereotypes perpetuated through visual media.
In addition, this panel is interested in papers that explore how audiovisual tools, such as “walking with video” (Pink 2007) and “sound walks” (Butler 2007), combine audiovisual and movement-based methods to study places. Recognizing the body as locus of our knowledge and experience (Desjarlais and Throop 2011: 89), these methods create encounters with (non-) human surroundings that can lead to a deeper spatial contextualization of stories, experiences, or memories. To explore the intersections of knowledge production and place-making, innovative methods such as walking interviews (Anderson 2004; Butler and Derrett 2014) and go-alongs (Kusenbach 2003) are already being employed, that can be complemented by audiovisual dimensions. Even if not labelled as ‘participatory’ per se, other methods have been shown to balance power relations through the act of drawing and the collaborative creation of ethnographic material that enables access to spatially situated affects and experiences. This is the case, for instance, with sensory and mental mapping, which allow us to go beyond representational conceptions of maps to visualise emotions and sensibilities (Mekdjian and Olmedo 2016). Acknowledging that such maps can reveal the subjective importance of certain landmarks and places (Trell and Van Hoven 2010), they can help to establish decolonial knowledge, for example by challenging conventional geographical orientations from indigenous perspectives.
In a similar vein, this panel welcomes contributions in the form of sketches, comics and other graphic outputs. Drawings, for example, leave more room for participants’ creativity and have the power to recreate “social memories” (Afonso and Ramos 2004) but also to imagine new, alternative futures. Drawings comprehend both “memories and expectations” and turn them into “storylines” and thus reveal different entanglements between past, present and future (Aalders 2020, 64). How can anthropological drawing function as a tool for making the invisible visible (Causey 2017), for instance in the context of belonging or memories of loss?
Finally, this panel also sets out to open discussions around concrete decisions related to the use of participatory audiovisual methods, such as choosing adequate equipment, selecting participants, and organising trainings and workshops. Furthermore, we invite scholars to reflect on ethical considerations involving such methods, notably with regard to ownership of data, confidentiality and privacy, issues of restitution, shared outputs and social responsibility.
This panel draws on our research on the legacies of past international development interventions in Eastern Africa under ERC Starting Grant AfDevLives at Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon. Inspired by the interdisciplinary nature of our work, this panel is open to a variety of case studies, research orientations, and regional foci across the continent. From religion to health, from gender to urban studies, we would like to create an inter-disciplinary forum on multi-faceted pasts in African contexts that encourages the co-creation of knowledge.
