Our Hong Kong Too! Disseminating Cellphilms in a Participatory Archive

• In Event: What Is a Cellphilm? Integrating Mobile Phone Technology Into Participatory Arts–Based Research and Activism

Abstract

There is a critical need to study the development of a participatory process in the dissemination of youth-produced cellphilms. This paper explores the case of a cellphilm-making project—with eleven ethnic minority young people in Hong Kong—on the political nature of schooling, their sense of belonging and civic engagement, as well as their management of a participatory archive of cellphilms. Through the creation of a shared archive on YouTube, the challenges and opportunities to participant management of co-created knowledge are exposed.

I ask:
• How has the participatory archive of cellphilms encouraged participants to share their sense of self, belonging, and citizenship?
• How do participants curate, maintain, and respond to a shared online archive of cellphilms?

By situating the cellphilms and digital archive maintenance as citizenship practices, I examine the ways that theories of youth citizenship have changed from presenting young people as deficient, apathetic, uneducated, or as citizens-in-training (Youniss et al., 2002), to viewing the real lives of young people as imbued with political moments and actions (Bixby & Pace, 2008; Buckingham, 2009; Lukose, 2009). Here, Buckingham (2000) argues that citizenship should be as a broad scope of political action, and that youth make political choices in their everyday lived experiences.

The study was carried out in Hong Kong over a period of six months, and included semi-structured interviews with each research participant, cellphilm-making workshops, a cellphilm screening event, and follow-up individual and small-group interviews with youth-participants. Participants engaged in a participatory analysis (Nind, 2011) of their cellphilms. The study has also included monitoring the ways that the cellphilm archive has been maintained and shared over six months (with participants able to edit, remove or add to the cellphilm archive without the researcher’s intervention).
The data sources for this paper include: twenty-two semi-structured interviews and eleven cellphilms shared through the participatory archive, We are Hong Kong Too, which is maintained on Youtube, and managed by participants through a shared password. In examining the dissemination of participant-produced cellphilms, the study focuses on the ways that the archive has been engaged with by participants, as well as others who are outside of the project (through comments left on the videos, number of views, and analytics).

Preliminary results from the study show that participants have shared the cellphilms across personal networks, and for their own political purposes. So far, others who have engaged with the archive have taken up the cellphilms an overwhelmingly celebratory manner. However, I cannot anticipate how others will take up the archive, or how participants continue to engage (or disengage) with the archive over time. As there is a critical need in the academic literature to examine participants’ roles in the dissemination of knowledge in participatory arts-based research (Park, Mitchell & De Lange, 2008; Rose, 2011), this project encourages participant ownership of knowledge production, as well as to create dialogue through the sharing of the archive in communities beyond the initial research space.

Author

• Casey Megan Burkholder, McGill University