What is ‘antimicrobial resistance’ and why should anyone make films about it? Using ‘participatory video’ to advocate for community-led change in public health.
Abstract
In this article we discuss the role of Participatory Video (PV) as a tool for developing
community-level solutions to ‘Antimicrobial Resistance’ (AMR) in Nepal. In recent
years PV has become an ever more popular tool in development contexts for
supporting communities in low and middle income countries to raise awareness of
issues that they do not feel are adequately represented in mainstream media. One
area of growing interest in this regard is public health. However, PV has not, to date,
been used to address AMR, currently considered to be one of the biggest public health
issues we face globally. Placing our project within the wider context of ‘participatory
documentary’ practice, we examine the worldview presented in the films this project
generated, a dimension of such projects that is, somewhat curiously perhaps, often
overlooked, with commentators tending to focus on the process of delivering PV,
rather than the final products made. Here we are particularly interested in questions
of power and how a close reading of these texts produced highlights the complexity of
the power relationships at work in these films, which, in turn, can allow us to reflect in
new ways on upon the processes at work in the project.