Angela Aguayo

Documentary Resistance: Social Change and Participatory Media offers a new approach to understanding the networked capacity of documentary media to create public commons areas, crafting connections between unlikely interlocutors. In this process communities invest in the exchange of documentary moving image discourse around politics and social change. This book advances a new argument suggesting that documentary's capacity for social change is found in its ability to establish forms of collective identification and political agency capable of producing and sustaining activist media cultures. It advances the creation of a conceptual, theoretical, and historical space in which documentary and social change can be examined, drawing upon research in cinema, media, and communication studies as well as cultural theory to explore how political ideas move into participatory action. This book takes a distinctive approach, understanding how struggles for social justice are located, reflected, and represented on the documentary screen, but also in pre- and post-production processes. To address this living history, this project includes over sixty unpublished field interviews with documentary filmmakers, critics, funders, activists, and distributors.

Angela Aguayo reports on “We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media,” a touring retrospective of documentary media projects coprogrammed by Louis Massiah and Patricia R. Zimmermann, with archival assistance from the XFR Collective, and featuring forty projects produced by thirty-six nonprofit community organizations and cultural centers. “We Tell” dives into more than fifty years of media as developed by embattled communities with a shared political vision and a focus on advocacy and addressing problems more often excluded from larger public concern. In her review of the exhibition, Aguayo argues that participatory community media presents a critique of representational politics within the larger documentary field and offers a corrective to the tourism tendencies of contemporary documentary-production culture by foregrounding collaborative authorship and collective agency.

This commentary calls for scholars, activist, archivists, and curators to work in alliance with social justice aims to collect documents of count-history to official reports of police violence. The modern archival craze can be traced back from the influences in nineteenth-century Victorian England. Cultural Heritage workers collected and archived the materials that serviced the empire. The new cultural heritage workers of the digital age exist formally in institutions but also informally in the streets, recording, archiving, and circulating with smartphones. Digital culture brings with it an abundance of public discourse but it quickly slips from the official record without a concerted effort to save, preserve, and collect vernacular history. The ephemeral character of this digital rhetoric requires that researchers must collect materials in real time, archiving history as it is happening.

The In-Between Spaces https://soundcloud.com/angela-aguayo/radical-media-lab-episode-1-ellen-spiro/ s-tvtH3 KEYWORDS feminist media pedagogy, motherhood, video activism, work-life balance, youth media This is what happens when you show up to get advice from your mentor and you don't get what you expect; you get what you need. In this podcast, Angela J. Aguayo interviews her teacher and mentor, the documentary video maker Ellen Spiro. The interview centers on documentary FIGURE 1. Documentary filmmaker Ellen Spiro.

While the documentary genre has frequently been conceptualized as a democratic tool with civic potential, the ways popular advocacy documentary functions in the process of social change is unclear. We need more information about the relationship between documentary agitation and collective organizing for social change, as well as about how this function shifts with the visibility of popular attention. Mainstream commercial culture is more than at odds with a commons of democratic exchange. The advocacy film is a time-honored tradition in documentary history, made specifically for the aims of democratic exchange. This type of film is produced for political causes by activists or advocates who are not closely connected with the government or decision makers. Often the director is constructed as a central creative force. Central figures usually function as surrogates for the film in public interviews and engagements; the speakers are often connected to sponsoring organizations. In this...

The impulse to record and document labor struggle is almost as old as the concept of documentary itself. From the Worker’s Film and Photo League to the activist programming of Labor Beat, documentary has had an intimate relationship with the labor struggle. This chapter addresses the history of labor documentary production in the United States as an expression of radical ideology. Challenging the aesthetic form and content of the mainstream media, the labor movement is a loosely connected network of activists and artists across the country, engaged in efforts to produce media outside mainstream institutions. Specifically, this chapter focuses on elements of labor history that made significant contributions but are now largely ignored and undocumented: the efforts of radical women, rank-and-file amateur videographers, and undocumented workers. Existing on the fringes of the mainstream and counterculture, the work of women in alternative media in the early 1970s reflected a direct rel...