Edinburgh Napier University

  This paper will discuss the author’s ongoing practice and research in participatory community based media in the Govan area of Glasgow. It explores the methodological, ethical and personal issues associated with practice and research in communities and the specifics of participatory and collaborative approaches to filmmaking.
The author has been involved in community media production in Govan since 2007, during which time she has also become a researcher, completed a PhD and published and built a body of work with local people through community media organisation, Plantation Productions. The paper examines a complex web of relations and representations, ethics and ethnographic research.
The paper outlines the author’s ethnographically informed, practice led approach to research and considers the ethics and logistics of research and visual practice production as well as practice as an arena of participation, collaboration and as a locus of knowledge.
The paper is concerned with production ethnography as methodology, with reference to the practice of documentary production. The paper explores “community collaborative” filmmaking (Elder, 1995), recognising the complexities of participation and how filmmaker and participants must negotiate a “moral place where subjects and image makers can mediate their own representation” (Elder, 1995:95).
This paper considers research that is embedded within ongoing production practice. It reflects on relations of production created through participatory media and how individuals, organisations and institutions collaborate in representations of Govan and its people.