Pushing the Limits of Participatory Video: Exploring Transgressive Voices through Researcher-Participant Minor Video-Making as a Non-Representational Practice

Abstract This article inquires into participatory researchers’ ‘representational’ practices in relation to sharing power with minority participants through collaborative video-making processes. The author argues that there is a limit to attaining such a political and ethical end because a ‘representational’ logic seemingly operates as the theoretical and methodological underpinning for participatory video, which undercuts its ability to represent the voices of collaborators. This article takes into account Shannon Walsh’s (2014) emphasis that “if participatory video is to be a significant method within a project for social change, we must push its limits, and its politics” (p. 140). This article does so by drawing on a ‘non-representational’ approach (Vannini, 2015) and the concept of ‘transgressive voices’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2009). The author discusses his experience with Deleuze-inspired ‘minor video-making’ as a relational and affective practice in which participants, tangible and intangible research objects and environments, and the researcher himself became relationally entangled to falsify any predetermined essentialized identity and to compose a powerful new body. In the unfolding of transgressive voices in the specific liminal space or moments during the minor video-making, the author ‘intensively and immanently reads’ (Masny & Cole, 2012) the entanglements during storyboarding, rehearsing, shooting, and editing.