How Professionalism Shapes the Voice of Human Rights Activist Videos

• In Event: Liberal Human Rights, Neoliberalism, and NGOs

Abstract

Looking at the work of three leading human rights groups that use video—Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and WITNESS—this paper examines how the unfolding attempts to professionalize video activism are shaping the voice of human rights videos. The starting premise is that video’s ability to facilitate voice is central to its use as a tool in human rights activism. Indeed, the public insertion of the activist voice has long been connected to social recognition and political engagement. Activists have therefore sought to uncover the processes that obstruct voice, connecting social injustice with a larger human rights framework. This paper argues that video facilitates voice both acoustically and visually through the combination of authenticity and the emotions in order to engage its audiences. It is this notion of voice that is directly impacted by the emerging professionalization of video activism by human rights groups.

The efforts to professionalize video activism are facilitated by two key developments: the unfolding rise of video as a human rights tool across different institutions (e.g., journalism, the law and advocacy) and broader NGO-ization processes that have elevated the institutional expertise of human rights groups as key representatives of civic voices. The employment opportunities provided by the NGO structure help sustain video activism economically and provide a place from which to assert responsibility for visual knowledge. Through video production and the development of video-making mechanisms and standards, human rights groups now seek to place themselves as visual specialists at times when these skills are needed across the institutional calculus that renders human rights claims legitimate, further compelling them to work within institutional paradigms. In its pursuit of institutional leverage, however, human rights videos move into the terrain of advocacy, underplaying the centrality of voice as an unbounded critical articulation of injustice by dislodging voice’s markers of identity, speaking on behalf of critical voices or leaving them out.

Author

• Sandra Ristovska, University of Colorado Boulder