Experiences of the resistances to violence using participatory documentary film making

Abstract

Over the last four centuries, South Africa has been shaped by the twinned, dialectical histories of violence and resistance to violence. However, because both violence and resistance encompass myriad formations and are underlain with a plethora of ideologies and hermeneutics, studying each - particularly from within critical community psychology - is oftentimes necessarily didactic and reductive. Yet, if this kind of research is to retain emancipatory potential, I contend, it should be both community-oriented and politically committed. In an attempt to understand how violence moves through Thembelihle, a low income community in South Africa, an expansive lens for conceptualising violence and resistance is advanced across this research’s four studies. In Study I, I use discursive psychology to examine how Thembelihle has been constructed in dominant discourse by analysing newspaper reporting on the community. Following this, in Study II and Study III, I draw on multimodal discourse analysis to study representations of quotidian life and political resistance in a participatory documentary film entitled Thembelihle: Place of Hope, which was collaboratively produced by residents of Thembelihle, professional filmmakers and myself. Lastly, in Study IV, I harness the narrative-discursive approach to explore how residents of Thembelihle build community in response to Thembelihle: Place of Hope. It was found that within dominant constructions, Thembelihle was personified as a monolithic and an essentially Other geo-cultural space, made newsworthy principally through its engagement with a broad, often vaguely-conceived, notion of violence. In response to dominant discursive constructions of this kind, community members who featured in and produced the documentary advanced a humanistic conception of Thembelihle which did not accept the different violences to which the community is subject. Following this, audiences of the documentary engaged the affective and political dimensions of community-building in order to advance a democratically conceived notion of collective will. These findings present critical community psychologists and violence scholars with a number of considerations around representation; the multitudinous nature of violence and resistance; psycho-politics; and radical hope. Ultimately, I argue, if such research is to be meaningful, it must be guided by and subordinated to the emancipatory requirements articulated by community members.