This volume celebrates cellphilm as an emerging Participatory Visual Method which effectively and powerfully engenders learning and catalyses social change. The book outlines the method’s theoretical framework, the role of the educator and researcher, and ethical concerns of using this method, and critically explores issues which determine the production and dissemination of creative outputs. The authors demonstrate the emerging methodology of cellphilm and how it can be utilised from both pedagogical and methodological standpoints. Using examples of cellphilms created to understand social issues, this book illustrates how the method enables diverse populations to document their communities and realities using mobile devices. By exploring cellphilm as a growing method in participatory visual research, the work fills an important gap in the fields of critically engaged community-based research, pedagogy and higher education for scholars and community activists.

What’s a Cellphilm? explores cellphone video production for its contributions to participatory visual research. There is a rich history of integrating participants’ videos into community-based research and activism. However, a reliance on camcorders and digital cameras has come under criticism for exacerbating unequal power relations between researchers and their collaborators. Using cellphones in participatory visual research suggests a new way forward by working with accessible, everyday technology and integrating existing media practices. Cellphones are everywhere these days. People use mobile technology to visually document and share their lives. This new era of democratised media practices inspired Jonathan Dockney and Keyan Tomaselli to coin the term cellphilm (cellphone + film). The term signals the coming together of different technologies on one handheld device and the emerging media culture based on people’s use of cellphones to create, share, and watch media. Chapters present practical examples of cellphilm research conducted in Canada, Hong Kong, Mexico, the Netherlands and South Africa. Together these contributions consider several important methodological questions, such as: Is cellphilming a new research method or is it re-packaged participatory video? What theories inform the analysis of cellphilms? What might the significance of frequent advancements in cellphone technology be on cellphilms? How does our existing use of cellphones inform the research process and cellphilm aesthetics? What are the ethical dimensions of cellphilm use, dissemination, and archiving? These questions are taken up from interdisciplinary perspectives by established and new academic contributors from education, Indigenous studies, communication, film and media studies.

This book focuses on cellphilming as a participatory visual methodology in arts-based research and teaching. The book aims to advance critical perspectives—and re-visioning—in relation to the co-production of knowledge through cellphilming. Many of the chapters come out of an international virtual symposium hosted by McGill University in June 2022. It brings together authors working in a variety of interdisciplinary areas and settings including work with Indigenous groups in Canada, girls and women with disabilities in Vietnam, youth in conflict and refugee contexts in Mali, and Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights in Canada, Nigeria, South Africa, and India. Some of the re-visioning addressed in the collection takes up place as we work in new contexts and situations as we are seeing with the idea of ethnographies at a and in relation to COVID-19. The genres, the place of reflexivity, and even the timing of participatory engagement might vary as a result of using virtual platforms necessitated by distancing. Other re-visioning takes place as a result of work with new communities, or new age populations and aspects of intersectionality, looking across work with very young children and older adults. This book contributes to further decolonizing cellphilming methodology to support participatory work in new ways, and with underrepresented groups for whom finding new ways for engagement is key. A special feature of the book is its attention to work with International NGOs. Chapter ‘Cellphones beyond the workshop: Youth researchers owning gender transformative change through participatory visual research in rural India during COVID-19’ is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Girls and young women, particularly those from rural and indigenous communities around the world, face some of the most adverse social issues in the world despite the existence of protective laws and international treaties. Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls explores the potential of participatory visual method (PVM) for girls and young women in these communities, presenting and critiquing the everyday ethical dilemmas visual researchers face and the strategies they implement to address them, reflecting on principles of autonomy, social justice, and beneficence in transnational, indigenous and rural contexts.

This edited collection seeks to enrich the dialogue about the expansive possibilities of visual sociological research facilitation. Although facilitating ethical research has long been identified within medical research literatures, there is a dearth of distinct perspectives and voices in academic theorizing when it comes to facilitating ethical research. For example, how can researchers learn and incorporate community created approaches to facilitation into their visual research approaches? Although ethics, positionality, and reflexivity remain important components of visual research, the authors argue that the incremental decisions made in real time by research facilitators within the process of visual research is currently under-theorized. This edited collection seeks to discuss how thinking about facilitation in a more critical and nuanced manner, as well as thinking through the kinds of relations, problems and local changes that happen within a project, can help visual sociological researchers move towards more equitable research practices.