Edinburgh Napier University

  What are the techniques of production that are used in local, small-scale media? How does the production process mediate identity and place, and how are these techniques reflected in locally produced media? And what can local representations of place and community tell us about the symbolic, social and physical spaces in which people live?

This paper is based on practice led doctoral research into participatory community media production on the Isle of Bute, on Scotland’s west coast. It will draw on examples from The Bute Video Project, where the researcher worked with local people and agencies to facilitate local video production.

The paper explores the different ways in which the participants re-imagined place, foregrounding their media production roles with personal experience. During the project, personal relations remained at the core of the production process, invoked in terms of inspiration, ethics and as networks to enhance production.

This paper will argue that the process of production and the videos themselves reflect an island with multiple identities and descriptions, a ‘reflexive community’ which is both knowing of itself and of the broader social, geographical and political world in which it is located.

The research presented here advocates an ethnographic approach to production as a process and as a locus of critique. Within this process the researcher draws on not only the nuts and bolts of ‘making videos’ but the before and after, the relationships, networks and embodied knowledge that participants bring with them and which is mediated during production.