Résumé

"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 interlockers. 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 the social change capacity of documentary is found in the genre's ability to establish forms of collective identification and political agency capable of producing and sustaining activist media cultures. Organized activist media publics often take on the necessary heavy lifting of political struggle, work that cannot be accomplished with the media screen alone. This book advances the creation of a conceptual, theoretical, and historical space in which documentary and social change can be examined. This interdisciplinary project draws upon research in cinema, media, and communication studies as well as cultural theory to explore how political ideas move into participatory action. This book will take a distinctive approach, attempting to understand 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 To address this living history, this project includes over sixty completed unpublished field interviews with documentary filmmakers, critics, funders, activists, and distributors. This will create a dynamic and practice-inclusive space in which documentary can be investigated"