Mobilising Critical Media Literacy through Documentary Film Production

Abstract

This thesis analyses a praxis of critical media literacy, in which socially engaged documentaries were produced in workshops with two groups of filmmakers at a local authority tower block and an adventure playground. It examines the efficacy of this media form as a vehicle for social action and considers the optimum conditions for film workshops to realise the agentive and emancipatory potential of critical media pedagogy. I aim to achieve these objectives by critically evaluating, alongside filmmakers as co-researchers, both the process and product of our critical media praxis: community filmmaking workshops and the socially engaged documentary productions that emerged from them. By foregrounding the voices of researcher-filmmakers, this work offers an insider’s perspective on the co-construction of a critical media praxis: identifying the pedagogical structures that they felt best supported them to articulate personally meaningful social concerns in their cultural productions. We critically reflect on the strategies that were deployed to harness the cultural resources of minoritised filmmakers as a basis for literacy learning and to develop a model of practice in which literacy was negotiated, contested and co-constructed.

Date of Award	1 Oct 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Helen Manchester (Supervisor) & Nariman Massoumi (Supervisor)