Transforming Voices: exploring women, vulnerability and organizations through experimental audio-visual ethnography

Transforming Voices is an audio-visual platform examining women’s organizational vulnerability through experimental non-fiction filmmaking. Specifically, Transforming Voices explores creative ways of presenting and working with oral accounts (voices) acquired through interviews and focus groups conducted by ethnographers and social scientists as part of the project Reducing Organizational Vulnerability of Women: Applying Organizational Research in Mexican-US Borderlands. This chapter offers a critical reflection on the project’s development, methodology and resulting films, with a focus on the project’s foregrounding of the voice (spoken account) as one of its primary creative elements and areas of investigation. The chapter also uses Transforming Voices as a starting point to think about the complex relationships between voice and vulnerability, the centrality of such relationships in the development of non-fiction film, as well as some of the relevant avenues for experimentation regarding these relationships presented in Transforming Voices.