Celebrating the Launch of a New Book

Welcome everybody to this event, this book launch for Revisioning Cell Filming. I'm just going to start with a land acknowledgement and then we'll say a little bit more about how this session is going to go. So just to say that for the land acknowledgement, although we convene today on a virtual platform, we acknowledge the land upon which we are physically located. This book launch is hosted by McGill University, an institution with an ongoing colonial legacy situated on unceded territory of the Gahin Gaha, but recognizing the land beneath our feet is just the beginning of our journey towards decolonization and reconciliation. This journey also involves acknowledging the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, continuing to hold our institutions accountable, and adding our voices to calls to divest. I encourage you all to reflect on the land that surrounds you today. wherever you are. Again, welcome to this book launch. This is the launch of Revisioning Cell Filming Methodology, but it's also the launch of a brand new series attached to a brand new project called Transform, Engaging with Young People for Social Change, and the series we are calling the Transform Learning Series. So this, we're going to say more about this at the end of the session as well. But this is one of many, many sessions that we are hoping to sponsor about book launches, there's video launches, there's webinars on many, many different topics. So I'm going to be introducing the team in a minute. But maybe before I start doing that, I just want to say, please, if you could keep your microphones on mute. And throughout the session, let's use chat as much as possible. So feel free to put in chat comments. And we will be trying to have a Q&A at the end, but heaven only knows where we will get to and how much time we will have. So for all of you, I'm Claudia Mitchell. I'm the director of the Participatory Cultures Lab at McGill University. I'm right now in Prince Edward Island. And we're just going to spotlight the three, my three co-editors. And you're going to be hearing from all of them during the course of the. the book launch. So can we just have a spotlight on Hani Sadati from the Center for Community-Based Research. Where are you, Hani? There he is. Yay! Okay. Hi, everyone. Okay. And can we just move a spotlight over to Lisa Starr at the University of Lethbridge? Hi, everyone. There she is. Yay! Okay. And finally, can we spotlight Shannon Roy, who is... in Calgary right now, but also from McGill University. Hello. Okay. And we deliberately and intentionally ended with Shannon because Shannon, as a real cell filmist, made a cell film about getting a copy of her book when it first arrived in the mail. So we couldn't resist screening it. So over to you, Shannon, to introduce it and screen it. Okay. Thank you, Claudia. Hi everyone, thank you for being here with us. My name is Shannon Roy, I'm one of the editors of the book. And before we dive into today's discussion, I just wanted to share a quick unboxing video I made when I first received my copy of Revisioning Self-Filming Methodology. I created the video to capture and share my excitement around the project, because I think the book represents important steps in advancing participatory visual methodologies. This moment felt like an interesting way to kind of begin our discussion, sharing my first encounter with the physical copy of the book through a cell phone video. I love that and of course we go to our own chapter first yes that's lovely thanks Shannon okay Oh So maybe before we jump right into hearing about all the chapters, I just want to offer a few words of thanks to many people. And if I miss anyone, I'll probably circle back to the end of this at the end of the session. But there are so many people to thank. I'm not sure if Sajneet Mangat is online or not, but she literally put the whole book together to send it off to the publishers. Anne Smith did a huge amount of work on editing the chapters. Lei Peng from Springer Nature was our key editor. Angela McDonald, communication, putting both at the time of the symposium and then getting instructions out to people and then getting ready for today. Rami Gorgas, who was with... was one of the people putting together the proposal in the first place. Leanne Brown, who is always somewhere in there in the background and or the foreground. And of course, today, Emi Romero, who put together the whole slide presentation and has been working on the Transform series. There are many more people. So I'll probably come back at the end of this. But just to say a huge thanks to all of these people and also so many people who who. participated in the original revisioning cell filming methodology symposium in June 2022. Many of the authors are here today, but we have other people like Catherine Banner from the University of Windsor, Angelina Weeney, who is now at UPEI, but was at First Nations University. Many people who contributed to pieces along the way, even if they are not directly in the book right now. So that's... kind of just a little bit of a thanks and then also of course to thank all of you who are representing so many countries and time zones from Australia to Mali to Botswana to India, various parts of Canada, South Africa, Sierra Leone. So we're just very happy to have all of all of you here today. And for today here are how things are going to work. We're going to kind of as all many of you know you've been preparing slides for this and we thought this was like a wonderful way to kind of like take a tour of the book and because we're recording it it also means that people will get a chance to share the book and the content of the book many many other ways and we hope that following this session we'll figure out a good way for people to do that but we're going to kick off with Hani Sadati who is going to just talk a little bit about the introduction to the book and then we're The book is actually divided into three sections, one on storying change, one that Shannon is going to talk about, and then the authors are going to present their pieces. The next section is about technology, and Hanny is going to say a little bit about that, and then we're going to hear from the authors. And finally, the third section is around pedagogy, and Lisa Starr is going to say a little bit about that section, and then we'll hear from the authors. We hope that we have time. for Q&A. We realize we're on a very tight schedule here, so we'll see what happens. But again, I encourage you to use chat throughout, applaud people, ask questions, put in comments, whatever you want to do. Let's make it as interactive as possible. And let's just enjoy it. It's very exciting. It's a lot of work to put a book together, and everybody works so hard. So it's just a delight to be here to launch it. So I'm going to disappear, not disappear, I'm not leaving, I'm just going to now turn it over to Hani who's going to lead us into a brief discussion of the first chapter. Thank you so much Claudia and hi everyone again. Yes my name is Hani Sadati, I'm a researcher at the Center for Community-Based Research located on the University of Waterloo campus. It's my pleasure to introduce the first chapter of our book which I had the opportunity to be co-editor. It's of it alongside of Claudia Mitchell, Shannon Roy and Lisa Starr. This chapter serves as an introduction to the book and aims to orient the reader to the main concepts that are explored throughout the chapters. And just as a quick definition for those who might be less familiar, just in case, with cell filming. So it's it's a combination of two words of cell phone and film and refers to to an arts based and visual method that utilizes the capabilities of smartphones and other devices with cameras. to create films to address a challenge, concern, or community issue. Next slide, please. So this introduction chapter is divided into four key... sections. The first section situates the book within the growing body of literature on cell filming. Cell films are becoming increasingly central to social change agendas, empowering researchers, communities, and NGOs to use mobile technology for creative expression and advocacy. Despite the successes in using cell films, there has been limited international dialogue about how this methodology has evolved. To address this gap in 2022, as Claudia mentioned, We initiated a conversation through an international symposium titled Revisioning Self-Filming, and now this dialogue is being extended through the chapters in this collective effort, continuing to explore and advance the field through this book. The second section includes autoethnographic accounts from the co-editors of the book, reflecting on how we became involved in self-filming and how our practices have evolved over time. The third section outlines the main body of the book which featured amazing chapters contributed by scholars from around the world, some of whom are with us in this session today. We have divided this section into three parts as Claudia mentioned, covered that part so I'm not going to repeat them again and they are also on the screen. Finally, the fourth section acknowledges the ongoing new discussion emerging in the field. such as exploring ways to share cell films and research findings through like composite videos or examining different forms of creation like meta cell films or exploring the notion of the life cycle of a cell film. Through this book we hope to further the discussion on visual methodologies and expand its role in community-based research and education. We also aspire to reach a wide audience of researchers, practitioners and NGOs. interested in participatory visual methods. Thank you, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the session and the book itself. Okay, so over to Shannon to introduce the first section. Great. Yeah, so the first section of the book, Storying Change, highlights how self-filming can amplify diverse voices and stories in transformative ways. From exploring the agency of young girls in South Africa to rethinking ethical approaches with children in participatory research, this section showcases powerful examples of change through storytelling. It also delves into the impacts of the pandemic and how cell filming has been used to bridge generational gaps and explore intersectionality. Each chapter brings to life unique ways in which cell filming can act as a tool for action. activism, representation, and connection. So without further ado, let us begin with Prudence Caldero-Bassett, Joshua Schwab-Cartez, and their chapter, I have something to say, self-filming and participatory work with young children, learning together how to include, amplify, and represent their voices ethically. Thank you, Shannon. So I didn't prepare a PowerPoint, I'm just going to be reading the abstract of the article and then I will screen a cell film. So I've been working with Josh Swab-Cartas who is at the University of Neskade and I am a professor in psychology at the University of Quebec in Dauwet and the University of Quebec in Montreal. So the abstract is, in this chapter, we explore critical issues on what it means to be a parent researcher and the responsibilities of taking up dual roles, advocating for our children and properly audience our children's work, along with our being a parent researcher has also led us to connecting with other parents researchers. We examine the complicated questions arising from concerns over visual ethics when working with young children. such as faces or no faces? Do we edit the cell film or not? If I do, have I taken away or manipulated the child's vision and or message? Is there a collaborative way to edit a cell film? These issues are explored through a series of engagements with our children and other children who participated in recent cell film workshops. So I will be screening a cell film now that was made in a daycare facility. with children between 8 and 11. And I'll be commenting just one minute after. La population brings lives Maisons d'Aix. Animals! Pollution is breaking down animals'houses! Okay! Okay! I think we move over to the next person now. Okay, no problem. Okay, so Fatoumata was supposed to be presenting, but I think the... Electricity went off in Mali, so I will. Next slide, please. So our chapter explores the ethical and practical dilemmas associated with using a no-face approach in participatory visual methods, particularly working with adolescents in conflict zones in Mali. There's a complexity involved in balancing between safeguarding adolescent participants and respecting their agencies. Because ethical decisions are often made by adults on behalf of the young participants, and that can undermine the empowerment that the research aims to achieve. So perceptions of age-appropriate behavior. and responsibilities as well interpretations of what count as agencies vary among actors. So socially accepted use of young people's images can be different and the rules pertaining to photography and films depend on the various contexts that we work in. Next slide please. In our chapter, we celebrate the no-face approach as part of the solutions. However, we acknowledge that who decides on what represents risks and who decides on what is the acceptable level of risks that young people should take can be problematic if we consider agency. No-face sell things. Cell films are great because they have their own aesthetics. They challenge viewers'horizons and expectations by forcing them to look at images differently. And we have a beautiful example here from a cell film. But to be agentic, research should involve young people in deciding what is visually ethical in the images that are. contextually appropriate, especially in conflict areas. We believe that they understand perhaps even better than adults who come from outside their communities what is representing a risk and what isn't. So we argue that agency should be factored in when we negotiate ethics in the design phase and with... ethics committee because ethics in a way should also be agentic. So by including agency in ethics, it can help us to shift the gaze and ways of looking at research participants, particularly in aid receiving countries. And it can also contribute to dismantle cliches and stereotypes and play a role in decolonizing. decolonizing, sorry, research practices. Thank you. We will now move on to using cell filming to explore agency in context, a perspective from rural South Africa by Lisa Weisbeck, Relable Mamorstein at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Next, we will move on to There's No Connection Between Us and Our Children at All, pre-screening dialogue as a way to establish intergenerational relationships. Hello everyone. So the authors of chapter 7 in this book are entitled There's No Connection Between Us and Our Children At All. These are the words of one of the parents who participated. In a pre-screening dialogue, before the school girls, which were our participants, were to facilitate a dialogue with the broader rural community that we worked with, we the researchers normally focus on two phases for example on creating cell films according to the participatory video process and screening the cell films so So we have realized the value of adding a pre-screening dialogue as a step between the self-filming and the screening to test the dialogue with the parents of the participants that we worked with, but also to enable and deepen the intergenerational dialogue about gender-based violence between the parents and the school girls. So... In this chapter, we explored the process and outcome of the pre-screening dialogue. I hope you will enjoy reading the chapter. Thank you. Hello everyone. And now we'll move on to the story behind the story, accounts of youth cell filmmakers on their experience of the pandemic. So this chapter specifically addresses how youth used cell filming to document their experiences from the pandemic. The chapter expands on the understanding of cell filming by exploring not just the films themselves, but the discussions and creative decisions that happened around the films. We posit that by examining the story behind the story, researchers can gain deeper insights into participants'experiences, emotions, and the creative process. So we use this diagram to explain kind of how we looked at the story behind the story in three main parts and we found that firstly situating the cell film so asking participants to give a brief introduction of their cell film really helped to give context to the participants work and it was Secondly, we found that if we ask questions around the creative decisions surrounding the cell films, so what creative choices did you make? And do these creative choices have any specific meaning? And that gave us really interesting information behind why the participants chose to show their cell film the way that they did. And if there's any kind of more symbolic meaning behind it. behind the choices that they made. And lastly, the post-screening discussion really helps to give participants an opportunity to make connections between each other. And that gave us information about their pandemic experiences as well. So the chapter generally suggests that self-filming is not just about the final product, the film itself, but also the process, both creative and reflective, and that contributes to social change and knowledge growth. The COVID-19 pandemic made me closer to masks and sanitizers while also separating me from family and financial security. Today the pandemic continues to live with me. In the morning when I have the same foods as I did during my four-month years. In between classes when I rush to print or sign readings because the textbooks are too expensive. In transit, when I'd rather travel far away because the groceries are cheaper, and also in the discomfort of silence that I have learned to harbor. In my travels, I'm learning and targeting the secret of the last last phrases. But also, in the cure that I've decided to learn this year, in the quiet practice of hope, and in the pursuit of being there for myself and for my peers. And so that's just an example of one of the cell films that came out of our work. Thank you. And we'll move on to the next chapter, which is bringing intersectionality theory to life, storing experiences of navigating the triple pandemics through cell filming as activist scholarship. Hi, everyone. So Maureen Nwina here presenting this. and really excited. I'm currently a PhD candidate out of Toronto, York University. And I really just want to say that I'm so honored that I'm here today and the book launches today because I'm just starting to recruit for my PhD research, which is around self-filming. So this book is really like godsend. So in... The winter of 2022, we gathered a group of Black women virtually that were impacted by the triple pandemics of HIV, COVID, anti-Black racism to make cell films. So this was between me, my PhD supervisor, Sarah Flicka, who I'm sure cannot be here, and Katie McEntee, who should probably be here, will be here later. So next slide. And so... It was really an honorable experience. And some of the things we found out from the women were around self-care, some of the challenges that people experienced during the pandemic, around Black joy, resilience, mental health issues. These are the themes that they matched. And really, so my current proposal for my dissertation actually builds from this. So from this really short... project that we conducted, my proposal is looking at pandemic recovery for Black women and Black women living with HIV and looking at what the pandemic recovery policies, if they're addressing the losses experienced by Black women during the pandemic. And so, as I said, I really don't want to say much, but you'll read it in the chapter, but I think it's really an honor to be here today. I'm so happy. I'm so excited to read all the amazing things. And I can't wait for my book. I really want to get my book. Thank you. Okay. Thanks, everyone. So the second section of the book, Technology and Change, draws together a set of chapters that remind us in different ways of the technology of cell phoning through the use of cell phones and other devices. in an ever-evolving area. So we will hear about various technology-related topics in this section, such as participatory self-film archives, Insta-workshop, the role of social media, specifically TikTok in self-filming, and more. So with this, I'm going to invite Casey Burkholder to introduce a chapter called Reflexivity, Revisiting Three Parts of Tori's Selfie Archives. Good morning. My name is Casey Burkholder, and I'm an associate professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair at the Department of Education at Concordia. Today, I'm going to be talking about my chapter in the book called reflexively revisiting three participatory cell film archives. When I was writing my doctoral dissertation, I theorized what a participatory visual researcher who engages with cell film method might do with cell films over time and how we might work to bring a more participatory ethos into the practice of archiving. I'd previously worked on a gesture toward a participatory cell film archive with pre-service teachers where they created short cell films that they produced about issues of identity and belonging in the social studies classroom. These teachers produced cell films individually and in small groups and uploaded their cell films to a playlist on YouTube from their individual accounts. They chose to make their cell films public, unlisted, or privately available. The idea was to share these cell phones with other pre-service teachers who might also benefit from thinking through these ideas in their practice, as well as to highlight the everydayness of cell film method and how it might be used in teaching. But a problem emerged. Linking the cell films to pre-service teachers'individual accounts meant that confidentiality could not be guaranteed. Pre-service teachers liked videos and curated playlists that were in no way connected to the project could also be ascertained in this way. Because of these problematics, I decided to proceed another way in developing what I thought of as a more participatory approach to the cell film archive for my doctoral work. In that work, I worked with racialized ethnic minorities. my former students to create cell phones about systemic oppression identity belonging and resistance amidst the umbrella revolution together we created we are hong kong 2 a youtube-based archive of cell phone since my dissertation project i've worked with cell phone method to share findings from a community-based research project that sought to highlight the existing and desired sex education that queer youth and non-binary youth in new brunswick need called sequin I also worked with Cell Film Method to disrupt the erasures of queer and trans histories from social studies in New Brunswick called Queer Histories Matter. Each of these projects resulted in the creation of several cell films and a YouTube-based playlist of cell films that I began to think of as a participatory archive. So in this chapter I explore three interrelated research questions. What might we do with participatory cell film archives? What are the opportunities and ethical challenges to participatory archiving, especially over time? What does it mean to audience the cell films across different audiences, spaces, and contexts over time? I argue that although initially theorized as a participatory space, the three examples of archives that I explore in the chapter do not do quite what I had set out for them to do. And yet, they offer something for participatory researchers interested in archiving an exhibition to think about. in relation to the curatorial function of the facilitator, time and the archive, and archiving with care. These are important considerations as we think through what we might do with the cell phones that emerge from project over longer periods of time. Thank you. Thank you, Casey. And the next chapter is Insta-workshop collaborative cell films. I'll let the authors introduce themselves. and the chapter um hello everyone um i will start a slide please so my name is felix um i'm just going to speak to this chapter i'll just give an overview of what the chapter is about and briefly tell you about my project and then allow max to come in to wrap up the conversation So, now you have the slide please. Alright, so this chapter explores the cell films as collaborative method to engage various communities via community generated workshop. So, these are working with community for community and by community and so if in the on the right hand side of the slide the As part of my PhD, I spent a couple of years working in a community that are solely into recycling glass bottles, into providing or designing fashionable beads as necklaces. So I spent a couple of times with them and as you all can agree to the fact that if you're able to... collaborate with communities by spending the mere fact of spending the time with them and living in a community, you're able to generate the best content from them. So this has been my community because I am originally from Ghana, although I've been living in Australia for some time now. So this community for ages has been working or creating designs using just glass bottles. So I saw the need to just have them project their stories. So that's an element of having that reflexive practice, which was able to offer them opportunity to really project their voices. And the fact of them providing or making their voices heard clearly means that they're able to represent themselves in the true ways that they want to do it. And so I, in the second picture, I actually went to live in the community. We spent a couple of weeks to organize some mini workshops. Before that, I did a couple of workshops in the schools, trying to engage some young individuals, training them how to use smartphones to tell their stories. And then So as part of my engagement with the community, we also had to witness the annual festival, which is a big festival that they organize in the community. So I had opportunity to capture those beautiful scenes as well. So the documentary is called Kokunonichi. It forms part of my PhD artifact. And it's a four-part documentary with each part telling the stories of the crowbow community, which are from in Ghana, from the sub-Saharan Africa. So the four parts, the part one will tell you about the crowbows and their creative lifestyle. Part two will tell us about the festivals that has the element of beat production. And part three gives us the types of beats. the glass beads that are produced in this community. And the last bit is where we wrap the whole documentary by celebrating the people, the festivals that is being guided as you can see in the picture. So it's an honor to be part of this book production and this is the second production after my PhD so I'm happy to be part of this team and then I'll hand over to Max. to wrap up the conversation. Thank you, Felix. Yeah, that's a really great one. So first to start, I acknowledge that I joined you from the land of the Runji people of the Kuli Nation here in Melbourne, Australia. And I think in this context, you're talking about self-filmmaking and storytelling. I think it's good to recognize that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the first, the First Nations culture here, the original storytellers, one of the oldest storytelling traditions in the world. I think it's really great when Claudia said that when the self-film revision symposium happened, I was like, oh wow, it's like two years ago. And I would also use the opportunity to congratulate Felix to his PhD, because when we joined, he was a candidate and now Dr. Felix's PhD is confirmed. For me, the most interesting thing in Felix's PhD was to think about the editing process. also as a collaborative and very much a reflexive approach. We see lots of collaborative films, but then the editing doesn't really shine through to be that collaborative, and I think that's what Felix demonstrated there. Just very briefly to sum up the other project you saw before, I'm a smartphone filmmaker, a cell filmmaker. There was some project that I produced before which were really about bringing the voice of the community to the foreground. One was called Eva in a Tour, which was made with a... National Council for Women in Rarotonga, Pacific Islands, and then one project at the Jersey Shore in the US, which was about the impact of Hurricane Jersey on the Jersey Shore and the people, the community, how they got together and helped themselves in that difficult situation. And I think some of the things, as much as Felix Films was there, to really think about the reflexivity of the storytelling process and creating the film as a conversation with the community and a dialogue rather than as a filmmaker. telling the story, telling the story with the people as a dialogue. And this has now in this chapter been written up as a methodology that also works very well for online collaborations and collaborative cell films. And there are three examples here. One was the project with the Goethe Institute in New Zealand, Aotearoa, which was on making cell films for a better climate. The key thing there to highlight is that we can only tackle things like climate change if everyone can contribute to this and we understand what people's perceptions and ideas about climate and the environment are. And then there's two other projects. One was commissioned by the Department for Land and Water in Victoria, Australia, where we looked at the future of Melbourne. and one with the Australian Cross to identify what humanitarian action would be. And so in these projects you also utilize the idea of Instagram so that these conversations can continue in the future as well using these platforms. And I just really would like to also thank again for that you could be part of this really great symposium and this really great book now. Thank you. Thank you so much Felix and Max and congratulations Felix. for your PhD. I was using this digital clap sign, but I noticed that nobody sees it. Congratulations. Okay. Oh, okay. So the next chapter, the title is Exploring TikTok as the Everyday Self-Im. And I'm just passing the mic to the author. Thank you, Hani. Good morning, everyone. Happy Tuesday. I'm very excited about this book launch and to be participating in it with everyone. My name is Sarah Modio and I'm a PhD candidate at McGill. This chapter, Exploring TikTok as the Everyday Cell Foam, looked to unpack some of my experiences as a teacher researcher working in adult secondary schools in Quebec. It aimed to breathe life into the interactions I'm privy to inside the classroom, which I'm actually inside my classroom right now. In this chapter, I look at nuances of the social media application TikTok to consider how the participatory visual methodology of cell filming is evolving in society. And the research question I was hoping to answer was, can content created on TikTok be understood to be the evolution of cell filming in culture and society? In this chapter, reflections appear as accounts of the production of two cell films that were created by my students in adult education secondary school in Montreal, Quebec. These students'age ranged between 18 and 40, and most were immigrant and refugee students. Reflective accounts allowed for us to look back at experiences in relation to other broader social contexts and gain greater awareness about their realities. They were recalled through one guiding question. What was the production process? We used photo voice intermixed into the reflections as three images that were taken during the production process. And these images serve to provide visuals and perceptions into meanings that were attributed to them. This chapter looks at the necessity for cell phone research to evolve. with the technologies present on mobile devices and in mobile spheres. Reflective research opens the door for us to investigate these topics that emerge in our day-to-day existence. And then finally, the data of this text was looked at through two reflexive accounts about the process of creating cell phones. They were analyzed through thematic coding, and three themes emerged. Tensions in power, health, politics, and misinformation, and the power of visual texts and the aesthetics on TikTok. The app so far has taught us through this chapter that there is something very compelling about concise communication and that the aesthetic options available on the app might actually be more important than the message in the video curations. And thank you for having me here. Thank you so much, Sarah. And the last but not least chapter on this section is cell phones beyond the workshop, youth researchers owning gender transformative change. through participatory visual research in rural India during COVID-19. I'm not sure who from the authors will take the mic. Probably Katie? Katie! Katie! Thanks, Hani. Yeah, my name is Katie McEntee. I'm a research associate at the University of Guelph and other places. And I'm very honored to be speaking on behalf of this chapter alongside... well, Rukmini Panda, who unfortunately couldn't join us today, and Claudia Mitchell, who I believe you probably are all familiar with. Next slide, please. So this chapter starts by recognizing various criticisms of participatory visual methodologies, ranging from the ways in which the representation of the work might be overly celebratory and risks being tokenistic, as well as the very practical concerns in relation to access to the technology needed to implement these methods such as mobile phones or tablets, data coverage and airtime. We're really interested in communities in which cell phone access is limited and where participatory visual methods that are meant to engage young people may be actually exclusionary in practice. So we take what we termed a beyond the workshop approach to youth led research in considering a feminist oriented research intervention that addressed gender based violence and sexual and reproductive health rights with rural young people in India. that included giving cell phones to its 20 participants. The study started with an Inception workshop in 2019, during which the youth researchers learned how to use their newly acquired cell phones to engage in photovoice and cell phone method to investigate gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health rights. And it became more complex when only a few months after the workshop and the youth researchers returned to their rural communities to conduct research, COVID-19 plunged the world into lockdown. So the public health restrictions added an unforeseen dynamic to the research by limiting the research team's interactions with the youth and in so doing offered a unique opportunity to deepen understandings of what ownership of both the cell phone and the issues could mean for participatory visual researchers and specifically youth researchers. So next slide please. So the Beyond the Workshop findings demonstrate how cell phone access supports feminist research by shifting ownership to the research process to the participants and makes possible participant-led advocacy. Being able to work independently with their cell phones in their communities, youth researchers explored a really broad range of issues and decided on how to use cell film and photo voice methods to advance women's rights and gender equality. Methodologically, the youth researchers'ownership of the research process was demonstrated in their mobilization efforts during COVID-19. The organization of community interventions, meetings with community leaders, as well as their increased personal comfort in talking about sexual and reproductive health rights and gender-based violence all demonstrated to us the way that the youth researchers'ownership, really took ownership over advocacy and taking advocacy. Now, program... programmatically, the challenges of this increased ownership were really mainly ethical in nature. Knowledge mobilization activities were at times uncomfortable and challenging, especially given the taboo nature of the topics that the youth were discussing. And the chapter concludes with several recommendations towards expanding and supporting youth's substantive ownership of the research process through and with their ownership of cell phones provided through research interventions. So we further argue that youth researchers'work is concrete evidence that investing in cell phones and internet access for participants strengthens their project's theoretical commitment to social justice. And in this case, gender equality and women's rights specifically. And the project really allowed the projects that allow for the purchase of cell phones at airtime for participants are taking active steps to decolonize research by counteracting extractive research practices. And they're recognizing that the cell phone has exponential value beyond the workshop for young people seeking to meaningfully engage and sustainably engage in gender transformative change. Thank you. Thank you, Katie. So this brings us to the end of part two of the book, and I'm going to pass the mic to Lisa to introduce part three. Thank you, Hani, and thank you for our previous presenters. I'm pleased to introduce the third section of the book, focusing on pedagogy and facilitating self-filming. We're very fortunate that we have five incredible chapters in this section, ranging from a focus on critical digital literacy to the work that's happening internationally at various NGOs. So we're very lucky to have, I think, the majority of the authors with us today. So instead of hearing from me, I'd like to hand it over to the authors, starting with Aaron Rosenberg, who will be sharing his chapter, Institutional Ethnography and Self-Filming, Supporting Critical Digital Literacy Practices in Secondary Education. Thanks so much, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be here today with all of you. And I especially want to express my appreciation to the editors. Lisa was my master's supervisor and then Claudia was my co-supervisor for the PhD. So I feel like this whole book is a very, it's a fun sort of coming together of a lot of different aspects of my research experience. Next slide, please. My approach to cell filming was based on the work of Dorothy Smith, who founded an approach to sociology called institutional ethnography. Institutional ethnography, or IE, is an approach to research that instead of trying to research about participants, it invites participants to research with the researcher about another topic. So a lot of the types of participatory research that we've heard about already today sort of fits within this frame where it's not about trying to think of your research participants as the research subjects. or objects, I guess, but rather their co-collaborators on the research journey. In the next minute or two, I'm going to share a little bit about why I think cell filming is such an appropriate approach to this type of participatory research. Next slide, please. So as we just heard from Katie, this isn't always the case where digital tools are something that young people or the participants in our research are very familiar with. but the students that I was working with were here in Canada, in British Columbia, and so the idea of using cell phones and digital technologies that they were already quite familiar with allowed them to take ownership of the research process in a similar way to how Katie described with the students or with the participants she was working with. I especially appreciate because my research was about digital tools and how to think more critically about our uses of these tools, the way that cell phones are both a tool that we're using to do the research, but also they're the focus of the research. So it was a bit of a meta approach to use cell filming to explore cell phone tools. The other piece that I think is so important about using digital tools for a participatory project is the way in which cell phones and new digital tools allow us to have more of an interactive experience with media. As Jenkins et al wrote in 2009, new media technologies make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. However, as the internet becomes more controlled by big tech corporations, it's harder for the average consumer to have a kind of choose-your-own-adventure approach to their internet experience. So this research both tried to capitalize on this participatory potential of digital tools, but also explore the way that that can be limited or challenging. Finally, because cell phone films aren't just a documentary, but also have some sort of an arts-based approach, I feel like they're actually able to affect change in a way that makes people feel things and can actually change behaviors. I love this quote from Claudia, where she writes that if we think that change is always about someone else or about some division of policymaking out there, we fail to recognize that all of us who engage in research, visual or otherwise, are already in positions to affect some change or some social action somewhere. Bringing students'cell phone experiences into the research process reminded them that it's not just in educational settings that they can make this change, but actually all the times when they're using their phone to communicate or to post things, that's also part of this process of trying to impact their community and their friends and family. And then the last slide please. So I didn't prepare a cell film to share with all of you today because my students or my participants didn't ask. preferred for them to be private. But some of the topics that we ended up exploring with students around cell phones with the cell films were things like online harassment, the environmental issues inherent in digital tools, the way that beauty standards or body image are explored or validated or challenged in online spaces, the exploitative labor involved in the mining, manufacturing, e-waste, all the different stages in the tech life cycle, the way that big tech influences young people's online consumer behaviors, like with algorithms and whatnot. students'challenges with the device overuse and the way that data is gathered on them while they're using digital devices. And here there's an image of some of the storyboards students used. I just want to close by, again, expressing my appreciation not only for all the editors and all the collaborators who wrote chapters, but also everyone else here who's here to learn and to listen. And especially a shout out to Angela and the team at the PCL for all the behind-the-scenes tech work. Because as we're exploring technology, it's not just about the content, but also this the formal features. So thanks for this really beautiful event today. Thank you, Aaron. Well said. So next, we have Cassandra Jones, whose chapter Re-Embodying Education, Sensory and Visual Methodologies of Cell Film and Walking with Video focuses on enhancing the capacity for sensory-based learning and pedagogical frameworks for incorporating walking in cell films. Thank you so much, Lisa. I'm Cassandra Jones. I'm a PhD candidate at McGill and a student of Dr. Claudia Mitchell. May I please have the next slide? All right, so methodologies in conversation. My chapter focused on putting two participatory visual methodologies in conversation, cell film and walking with video. For me, cell filming draws on Pink's notion of walking with video. For her, this is a phenomenological research method that attends to sensorial elements of human experience and place name. As a simple method, this means walking with... and video recording research participants as they experience, tell, and show their material, immaterial, and social environments in personally, socially, and culturally specific ways. That's Pink in 2007. For this workshop, I drew on both cell phone and walking with video methodologies to create a hybrid method to which I refer to as walking cell phones. Claudia generously invited me to lead this workshop. in her class where I was also a student. So the workshop, Re-Embodying Education Through Walking Cell Phones, my aim was to have participants use a hybrid approach called walking cell phones to extend visual methodology into the realm of sensory and experiential learning to move towards the goals of transformative education. The students engaged with the following overarching research questions. How do you use your senses? and sensorially experience the neighborhood environment. Is a neighborhood an accessible space? What do you have access to in this neighborhood and what do you not have access to? These research questions and set of prompts were designed to help the researcher participants harness a visual methodology to think through their senses and use their feeling bodies that are often silenced or ignored in research and educational contexts. as ways of generating knowledge and participating in the field and in this way re-embody education. When this workshop took place we were still in the pandemic and we were in a virtual classroom all together. Many of us had never met each other and so I really wanted people to go out into the neighborhood and kind of re-embody and experience places that we had lost touch to in the pandemic. So I'd like to share four succinct highlights on the next slide please. So these are four highlights that emerged leading to the theoretical development of this approach and a rich opportunity for transformative learning in relation to the social issues students experience both sensorially and environmentally within their local neighborhoods. And these neighborhoods kind of act as our field site. So the first is sensate researchers. I asked students to use their bodies to gather data. What does it feel like, smell like, the visuals? This form of using their body enabled them to become sensate researchers. The second is walking cell phones. So in putting cell phone conversation with walking video, this approach of walking cell phones emerged, which is kind of expanded upon and discussed in the chapter. And then three, it led to sensory-in-place learning. So this called what Howes refers to, again, as sensory-in-place learning and sensory-in-place knowing. The connection between mind-body environment. As they move through their neighborhoods, they learn sensorially and experientially and enacted forms of placemaking. And fourth, this led to sensory-based cell phone pedagogy. as they were asked to go into the neighbourhoods beyond the virtual classroom of the pendek, an often disembodied state, to participate in re-embodying their learning. And so I'll conclude with the chapter provides the research questions and prompts to kind of showcase the structure of leading this workshop with students. I'd like to thank everyone involved in the book for this beautiful opportunity and this wonderful book launch today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Cassandra. Next, we have the chapter Getting Ready to Cell Film, Training the Team to Work with Adolescents to Create Cell Films to Support Intergenerational Dialogue in Bauchi State in Nigeria. And we have authors Anne Cockcroft, Umaira Ansari. Khaled Omer and Yagana Gadado talking about the unique perspective on self-helming pedagogy and the challenges of collaborating with adolescents and community members. Thanks very much. Hello everyone. I'm Anne Cockroft. I'm part of the academic unit of participatory research at McGill. But the chapter is about cell filming in Bouchy, as you've mentioned. When we began our chapter in 2002, we were real newbies to cell filming. We've been doing participatory research for decades. It's our identity. And in fact, we've used visual methods to share and discuss findings, producing short 10 to 20 minutes. docudramas, but we had no experience of cell filming. Oh, wait a minute, I'm getting a message about changing to a different language. I don't know what that means. Our chapter describes how we address the challenges that we faced to train a sizable team of about 20 young people in northern Nigeria. We needed to train them not only to make cell films themselves, but they also needed to be able to train and support adolescents in rural... I think I need the next slide, sorry. Yes, we also needed to be able to train them to train and support adolescents in rural communities to create cell films and share them with their parents and community leaders. The cell films were on the overall topic of adolescent sexual and reproductive health and different issues within that. In our chapter we describe how we trained ourselves with a little help from our friends in the participatory cultures lab at McGill, and then we trained the team of young people. It was a stepwise process. Oh, yes, okay. All right, we've got the things I was going to mention. It was a stepwise process. One big help was to run a mini cell film festival in Bouchy for their creations, and that was an enormous help. We were left with questions. How would our trained young team cope? with training adolescents for cell filming at scale? And how would the community leaders and parents respond to the cell films for the young people? What would be the transformative impact of creating and sharing cell films on the adolescents themselves and other stakeholders? And could we measure it? So next slide, please. So I'm taking the liberty of going briefly beyond what we wrote in our chapter. because it's now 2024. So the first thing is that, if you could click please, our training equipped the young team pretty well. Since 2023 they've trained and supported 540 adolescents who've created and shared 120 cell films in 30 communities. It's been wonderful to watch them blossom into such effective trainers and and mentors for the adolescents. Could I have the next, if you click again? The community leaders have indeed, they've responded well, they paid attention to the cell films and to their creators, it's changed their views, it's shifted their perceptions about the young people, they've listened to them and now they're working with them to tackle agreed priority concerns around ASRH. I don't think... this intergenerational connection would have happened without the cell films. We've had no negative reactions, even when the cell films are covering pretty sensitive topics. Click once more please. It's clear to us that this has been a transformative experience for the adolescents and for other stakeholders. We're trying to measure this using both questionnaires and narratives of change. So I want to finish by saying watch this space for the results. Thank you very much. much. Thank you, Anne. Next time, I'm pleased to hand this over to two delightful colleagues that I work very closely with, Claudia Mitchell, whom many of you work very closely with as well, and Jennifer Thompson, who are going to discuss the chapter that we contributed to the book titled Revisioning as Practice in Cell Filming in Sierra Leone. A reflexive account of addressing gender transformation in the moment, where we focused on the notion of learning in the moment as a framework for a pedagogy of facilitation in self-filming. And then we'll also share insights into storyboarding as intervention and emerging genres of self-filming workshops. So Jen, take it away. Thanks, Lisa. So I'm Jen Thompson. I'm a research associate with Transform, presenting on behalf of Claudia and Lisa. Our chapter draws on a four-day workshop that we co-facilitated in Sierra Leone in 2022 in collaboration with Code to support teachers in the use of cell filming to address gender transformation in their teaching. Often in cell film workshops, we've seen how screening participants'cell films can elicit laughter, some clapping, sometimes some knee slapping, and lots of critical questions and comments about the topics that are taken up and the issues that are in the cell films. But in this particular workshop, the first round of cell films sort of fell flat. It didn't really have that effect. So our chapter takes up the pedagogy of facilitation and to showcase three examples of adaptations that we co-developed with participants as we learned in the moment how to revision self-filming with this group. Next slide, please. First, we developed tailored large format storyboards on flip chart paper. Typically, we print blank storyboard templates on sort of letter sized. paper or A4 paper with minimal structure. But in the moment we realized that the larger format, just making it bigger, made the group process more accessible for participants to gather around and contribute their ideas to their cell phone. The tailored guidance within the different sections of the storyboard, within the storyboard itself, was helpful. with clarity around the different genres that we were working with like media message cell films and interview cell films. Next slide please. Second, to overcome sound challenges which I'm sure most people are familiar with, participants developed what we saw as a new genre that we hadn't seen before in our work and that we're calling the narrative voiceover. So in the moment, participants figured out that having one person narrate behind the camera while others performed on camera helped to circumvent some of the sort of persistent challenges, sound challenges like background noise and the low quality microphones on the tablets that we were using. At third, inspired by Daphne and Tomaselli's work on cell phones as being fit for the smaller screen, In the moment, we had participants re-screen their cell phones on the tablets. We didn't project them. We just had groups work with tablets to re-screen their cell phones with some questions to support participants to reflect on what they might want to improve in their cell phones, and then an opportunity to re-shoot their cell phones, which resulted in stronger cell phones with clearer messages and more laughter and clapping and critical questions. So we'd like to leave you with one of these cell phones made by pre-service teachers to address their concerns about early marriage and it's called She's Too Young. Next slide. Greetings Mama Haja. I am here to be a bride for your daughter, to be my fifth wife. No, she's too young. Yes, I'm too young. She's too young. She's too young. I'm too young. She's too young. Yes, she's too young. Say no to early marriage. Thanks, Jen. I always get a little bit of goosebumps when I see that self-film, and I'm sure many of you who are re-watching some of the ones that you've included have a similar reaction. Finally for this section, and I think it's an appropriate way to kind of close on the book chapters, Nessa Bandarcharian-Rashti and Claudia Mitchell will be sharing a chapter that is a conversation or discussion amongst panelists from three. or from several international NGOs, Code, Plan Canada and Oxfam, describing how cell filming is being used in their respective organizations. Thanks. Thanks, Lisa. I'm not sure. Nessa, are you here? I'm not sure if Nessa's here. I think I'm here. I'm here for us. OK, so, yeah, this is this is the last chapter in the book, but far from being the last chapter. I think it became the first chapter of a new book or a new life. But one of the things that has been really so... exciting, I think, in the last couple of years is working with Plan, Oxfam, Code, Equitas to realize how NGOs are taking up cell filming, how they're supporting it, and how they're seeing this work in interventions and advocacy. And one of the special moments, I guess, of the special opportunities in the symposium was to have this involvement of NGOs talking about this work and their presence there. And I think that's a really important part of the work. One of the sessions that we convened was a conversation facilitated by Catherine Vanner, who is from the University of Windsor. And I'll just maybe turn to the next slide. She came up with these four questions. You know, how did you first learn about cell filming and what made you think it would be a good fit for your NGO? Why do you think it's a useful tool? Does it have any kind of different uses or different purposes or value in work as opposed to in research? How does it? respond to the risk of tokenism and manipulation and whether it mediates that in any way? And then do you see cell filming as a way of challenging and subverting some of the conventional frameworks and gender norms? So these were like really powerful questions. The session was only one hour, I think, but like the data coming out of this. So Nessa and I decided to turn it into a chapter with the consent of all of the speakers. And of course, we also learned how difficult it is to turn the spoken word into the written word sometimes, to hang on to the messages, but to make sure that there was always context there. And the chapter, I think the comments, the words of Aishak Sharif from Plan, Deborah Simpson, who was then working with Code, and Ratba Natia, who is, Natia, pardon me, who is still working, I believe, with Oxfam, they're just like gems. And they just started off a whole train of new thoughts. And that's why I say that really it's the last chapter in the book, but it ended up being a new chapter. Because out of that work in 2022, and going back to doing more work with code in Sierra Leone and the project that Jen just... described, we hatched a plan to develop a partnership grant funded by SSHRC, or proposed to SSHRC, and this particular event was also funded by SSHRC, to try to think through how would researchers who are passionate about participatory visual methodologies and working with young people and NGOs who are passionate about advocacy and social change and working with young people How could we come together as part of a project? So I say it as the last chapter and the first chapter, because it was out of that work that we designed the whole new project called Transform, engaging with young people for social change. And the central place of the NGO world in that project is just so absolutely critical. So we're just going to end with the last slide. And you have to... You have to imagine a drum roll on this. This is another box and it is the birth of Transform. Drum roll. Okay, all right. Ta-da! Okay, so that's our last slide for that particular piece. Thank you. Thanks. So thank you everybody and congratulations to all the authors. I just realized, did Labo join later or not? No. Okay. All right. So thank you and congratulations to all the authors. We have a couple of minutes for some Q&A, for some opportunities for people to engage in any dialogue. So maybe we can just take the screen down and see if there's some burning questions in the, many of you heard. the original papers that led to these chapters but you didn't necessarily get the chapter until um you received your book if you received your book and we're going to talk about that too but any questions or comments um yeah there is one from azam in the um okay oh i got it direct message i'm just going to read it out and i think it's a general question so anyone who feels uh they have a comment on it just please jump in you As Am says, with regard to the question of power, knowledge, epistemology and methodology, the pressing dilemma is who is the knower? Ethical codes such as omitting faces or manipulating images through editing under the pretext of protecting individuals could in some cases systematically silence marginalized voices. So who is the knower? Are ethical codes set in stone or should they, based on various theories, including Donna Harway's theory of situated knowledge, be critically questioned through reflexivity? In this context, do the images reveal or conceal? It's like an incredible thesis statement. Just go to the if anyone wants to. Yeah, go ahead. Angela, is it possible to put the question in the chat? Sure. Thank you. Okay. Anyone want to have a go at that? Oh, Aaron, yay, go for it. What made me think about the difference between doing this type of research in communities where all the participants are already very familiar with cell phones and technology, digital technologies, whereas a lot of the chapters in the book are in communities where the researcher brings the technology to the community. And I think that question that was posed about who is controlling this process and what does that look like is so important because everyone, regardless of our... participants comfort with digital tools really wants our participants to be the voices that are centered so I think it's a really important question for us to keep thinking about in whatever context. Maureen do you want to take a thanks Erin Maureen do you have your hand raised do you want to contribute there? Yeah I wasn't going to contribute to that but I'm just going to like Angela Mcdonald's post and I think back to Aaron's presentation on ethnography. Honestly, I'm kind of new in self-filming and it's so exciting. I started hearing about it in my master's course with South Africa and then I decided, you know, it makes sense. But I like as I'm developing, I've just completed my flyers and I'm doing recruitment. And I think because my research is with black women living with HIV, some of the questions that for me I've been thinking about are the same questions that have been presented here. especially around ethical dilemmas, around confidentiality, around, you know, I think the presentation around faces, keeping the faces out is really like, so all I want to say that I'm, in fact, just this morning, I've learned a lot from everybody's presentation. So thank you, everyone. Despite that there was shot, but I think I learned a lot. I'm just wondering if those presentations will be, I know you said there'll be a video, if they'll be all together and we can have access to it, because I really want to go back to that. But really, I'm so excited. I can now kind of picture how I want to do my research and have more like concrete plan on it because, you know, it's the right time. So, again, I'm so thankful and I'm excited and I cannot appreciate how amazing it is that this book. got launched at this particular moment. Thanks so much, Maureen. Just to address the question of the video, we will be going back to all of the people who spoke today, just to make sure if there's any concerns about sharing the video. If there is, obviously we won't share your piece, but the idea is to have this available after the fact. Shannon? Yeah, I just wanted to briefly say when I read this question. It really made me think a lot about Prudence's and Josh's chapter in regards to supporting children in making cell films. And I think this question, too, could be explored further by by looking at that chapter in the ways that they ask questions about how do we support participants or in this case children? And and when we do, are we? are we employing our voices onto that information? So it's definitely an important consideration. And I think that, yeah, I have something to say chapter addresses that quite a bit as well. Prudence, please. I was so glad you put your hand up because I cut you off and I didn't mean to when you were speaking. So please go ahead. Thank you so much. Thank you for your comment, Shannon. I think it's an important piece in the work that we did, Josh and me together. I just wanted to say that the cell phone that I screened was actually a cell phone that was made in a facility where there was about, I think, like seven or eight teams of children that worked together. And this team worked with the mother of one of the children. She was there to make the cell phone with them. And like it happened that another mother, because two are siblings, was also there. And so she was able to give consent. Both parents were able to give consent for the faces of children, but this created a situation because all the other children of the daycare that couldn't have their faces, because we adopted a no-face approach in the first place, and all the other children started to say, well, it's not fair. Why do they have their faces and we can't have it? So that really brought us to reflect on that. on that question and i just wanted to add like i i put it in the chat but i i think maybe it's good that it's in the video um that the message because the cell phone was in french so the message that the children want to wanted to say uh the the topic was uh uh it's not fair and uh the message was pollution breaks the homes of animals i just wanted to say it in english for people that don't speak French, and to carry the message of the children, which is the most important. Thank you. All right, well that just about brings us to the end. I do want to say that I mentioned at the very beginning that this is actually the launch of a brand new series within Transform called the Transform Learning Series, and if you like this, come back on October the 9th for the next The next episode, which comes out of the Transform Project, a dialogue on youth leadership and research. You'll be joining Naomi Nichols from Trent University, Jane Mellenfall from McGill, Lebo Moletsani from UKZN, and some young people from various projects will, I think, be part of this as well. But it will be a two-hour dialogue on ways of working and engaging with young people in exactly the kinds of questions that... Azam and others have raised in terms of ethical issues and beyond the workshop and during the workshop and how do we do this work. So we're excited to launch this. And if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to email us, come back to us. And just to say once again to everybody, thank you so much for being here. To all the authors, thank you. This was like, it was like just listening to everybody today. I'm feeling like, oh. It was such a rich collection, and it joins the amazing collection that Katie and Sarah Flicker just co-authored last year, as well as the groundbreaker, What's a Cell Film Anyway? Is that the right title? Katie and Josh and Casey from 2016. And many more coming. This is like, we just keep writing these things. It just makes a big literature to review for a new doctoral student. So sorry for you, Maureen, but you'll just have to review more books and more publications. So once again, thank you, everybody. This was an absolute pleasure. What a great morning. I'm so excited. Okay, so yay! Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Stay in touch. And thanks, Lisa. Shannon and Hany, your amazing co-editors on this project. Thanks, Claudia. Bye. Bye. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Bye. And the next in October. Yes, October the 9th. Come back.

This book launch is hosted by McGill University, an institution with an ongoing colonial legacy situated on unceded territory of the Gahin Gaha, but recognizing the land beneath our feet is just the beginning of our journey towards decolonization and reconciliation. This journey also involves acknowledging the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, continuing to hold our institutions accountable, and adding our voices to calls to divest. I encourage you all to reflect on the land that surrounds you today. wherever you are.

Again, welcome to this book launch. This is the launch of Revisioning Cell Filming Methodology, but it's also the launch of a brand new series attached to a brand new project called Transform, Engaging with Young People for Social Change, and the series we are calling the Transform Learning Series. So this, we're going to say more about this at the end of the session as well.

But this is one of many, many sessions that we are hoping to sponsor about book launches, there's video launches, there's webinars on many, many different topics. So I'm going to be introducing the team in a minute. But maybe before I start doing that, I just want to say, please, if you could keep your microphones on mute.

And throughout the session, let's use chat as much as possible. So feel free to put in chat comments. And we will be trying to have a Q&A at the end, but heaven only knows where we will get to and how much time we will have. So for all of you, I'm Claudia Mitchell.

I'm the director of the Participatory Cultures Lab at McGill University. I'm right now in Prince Edward Island. And we're just going to spotlight the three, my three co-editors. And you're going to be hearing from all of them during the course of the. the book launch.

So can we just have a spotlight on Hani Sadati from the Center for Community-Based Research. Where are you, Hani? There he is. Yay!

Okay. Hi, everyone. Okay. And can we just move a spotlight over to Lisa Starr at the University of Lethbridge? Hi, everyone.

There she is. Yay! Okay. And finally, can we spotlight Shannon Roy, who is... in Calgary right now, but also from McGill University.

Hello. Okay. And we deliberately and intentionally ended with Shannon because Shannon, as a real cell filmist, made a cell film about getting a copy of her book when it first arrived in the mail. So we couldn't resist screening it. So over to you, Shannon, to introduce it and screen it.

Okay. Thank you, Claudia. Hi everyone, thank you for being here with us. My name is Shannon Roy, I'm one of the editors of the book.

And before we dive into today's discussion, I just wanted to share a quick unboxing video I made when I first received my copy of Revisioning Self-Filming Methodology. I created the video to capture and share my excitement around the project, because I think the book represents important steps in advancing participatory visual methodologies. This moment felt like an interesting way to kind of begin our discussion, sharing my first encounter with the physical copy of the book through a cell phone video.

I love that and of course we go to our own chapter first yes that's lovely thanks Shannon okay Oh So maybe before we jump right into hearing about all the chapters, I just want to offer a few words of thanks to many people. And if I miss anyone, I'll probably circle back to the end of this at the end of the session. But there are so many people to thank. I'm not sure if Sajneet Mangat is online or not, but she literally put the whole book together to send it off to the publishers. Anne Smith did a huge amount of work on editing the chapters.

Lei Peng from Springer Nature was our key editor. Angela McDonald, communication, putting both at the time of the symposium and then getting instructions out to people and then getting ready for today. Rami Gorgas, who was with... was one of the people putting together the proposal in the first place. Leanne Brown, who is always somewhere in there in the background and or the foreground.

And of course, today, Emi Romero, who put together the whole slide presentation and has been working on the Transform series. There are many more people. So I'll probably come back at the end of this.

But just to say a huge thanks to all of these people and also so many people who who. participated in the original revisioning cell filming methodology symposium in June 2022. Many of the authors are here today, but we have other people like Catherine Banner from the University of Windsor, Angelina Weeney, who is now at UPEI, but was at First Nations University. Many people who contributed to pieces along the way, even if they are not directly in the book right now. So that's...

kind of just a little bit of a thanks and then also of course to thank all of you who are representing so many countries and time zones from Australia to Mali to Botswana to India, various parts of Canada, South Africa, Sierra Leone. So we're just very happy to have all of all of you here today. And for today here are how things are going to work.

We're going to kind of as all many of you know you've been preparing slides for this and we thought this was like a wonderful way to kind of like take a tour of the book and because we're recording it it also means that people will get a chance to share the book and the content of the book many many other ways and we hope that following this session we'll figure out a good way for people to do that but we're going to kick off with Hani Sadati who is going to just talk a little bit about the introduction to the book and then we're The book is actually divided into three sections, one on storying change, one that Shannon is going to talk about, and then the authors are going to present their pieces. The next section is about technology, and Hanny is going to say a little bit about that, and then we're going to hear from the authors. And finally, the third section is around pedagogy, and Lisa Starr is going to say a little bit about that section, and then we'll hear from the authors.

We hope that we have time. for Q&A. We realize we're on a very tight schedule here, so we'll see what happens. But again, I encourage you to use chat throughout, applaud people, ask questions, put in comments, whatever you want to do. Let's make it as interactive as possible.

And let's just enjoy it. It's very exciting. It's a lot of work to put a book together, and everybody works so hard.

So it's just a delight to be here to launch it. So I'm going to disappear, not disappear, I'm not leaving, I'm just going to now turn it over to Hani who's going to lead us into a brief discussion of the first chapter. Thank you so much Claudia and hi everyone again.

Yes my name is Hani Sadati, I'm a researcher at the Center for Community-Based Research located on the University of Waterloo campus. It's my pleasure to introduce the first chapter of our book which I had the opportunity to be co-editor. It's of it alongside of Claudia Mitchell, Shannon Roy and Lisa Starr.

This chapter serves as an introduction to the book and aims to orient the reader to the main concepts that are explored throughout the chapters. And just as a quick definition for those who might be less familiar, just in case, with cell filming. So it's it's a combination of two words of cell phone and film and refers to to an arts based and visual method that utilizes the capabilities of smartphones and other devices with cameras.

to create films to address a challenge, concern, or community issue. Next slide, please. So this introduction chapter is divided into four key...

sections. The first section situates the book within the growing body of literature on cell filming. Cell films are becoming increasingly central to social change agendas, empowering researchers, communities, and NGOs to use mobile technology for creative expression and advocacy.

Despite the successes in using cell films, there has been limited international dialogue about how this methodology has evolved. To address this gap in 2022, as Claudia mentioned, We initiated a conversation through an international symposium titled Revisioning Self-Filming, and now this dialogue is being extended through the chapters in this collective effort, continuing to explore and advance the field through this book. The second section includes autoethnographic accounts from the co-editors of the book, reflecting on how we became involved in self-filming and how our practices have evolved over time. The third section outlines the main body of the book which featured amazing chapters contributed by scholars from around the world, some of whom are with us in this session today.

We have divided this section into three parts as Claudia mentioned, covered that part so I'm not going to repeat them again and they are also on the screen. Finally, the fourth section acknowledges the ongoing new discussion emerging in the field. such as exploring ways to share cell films and research findings through like composite videos or examining different forms of creation like meta cell films or exploring the notion of the life cycle of a cell film. Through this book we hope to further the discussion on visual methodologies and expand its role in community-based research and education. We also aspire to reach a wide audience of researchers, practitioners and NGOs.

interested in participatory visual methods. Thank you, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the session and the book itself. Okay, so over to Shannon to introduce the first section.

Great. Yeah, so the first section of the book, Storying Change, highlights how self-filming can amplify diverse voices and stories in transformative ways. From exploring the agency of young girls in South Africa to rethinking ethical approaches with children in participatory research, this section showcases powerful examples of change through storytelling. It also delves into the impacts of the pandemic and how cell filming has been used to bridge generational gaps and explore intersectionality.

Each chapter brings to life unique ways in which cell filming can act as a tool for action. activism, representation, and connection. So without further ado, let us begin with Prudence Caldero-Bassett, Joshua Schwab-Cartez, and their chapter, I have something to say, self-filming and participatory work with young children, learning together how to include, amplify, and represent their voices ethically.

Thank you, Shannon. So I didn't prepare a PowerPoint, I'm just going to be reading the abstract of the article and then I will screen a cell film. So I've been working with Josh Swab-Cartas who is at the University of Neskade and I am a professor in psychology at the University of Quebec in Dauwet and the University of Quebec in Montreal. So the abstract is, in this chapter, we explore critical issues on what it means to be a parent researcher and the responsibilities of taking up dual roles, advocating for our children and properly audience our children's work, along with our being a parent researcher has also led us to connecting with other parents researchers.

We examine the complicated questions arising from concerns over visual ethics when working with young children. such as faces or no faces? Do we edit the cell film or not?

If I do, have I taken away or manipulated the child's vision and or message? Is there a collaborative way to edit a cell film? These issues are explored through a series of engagements with our children and other children who participated in recent cell film workshops.

So I will be screening a cell film now that was made in a daycare facility. with children between 8 and 11. And I'll be commenting just one minute after. La population brings lives Maisons d'Aix. Animals! Pollution is breaking down animals'houses!

Okay! Okay! I think we move over to the next person now. Okay, no problem.

Okay, so Fatoumata was supposed to be presenting, but I think the... Electricity went off in Mali, so I will. Next slide, please. So our chapter explores the ethical and practical dilemmas associated with using a no-face approach in participatory visual methods, particularly working with adolescents in conflict zones in Mali.

There's a complexity involved in balancing between safeguarding adolescent participants and respecting their agencies. Because ethical decisions are often made by adults on behalf of the young participants, and that can undermine the empowerment that the research aims to achieve. So perceptions of age-appropriate behavior.

and responsibilities as well interpretations of what count as agencies vary among actors. So socially accepted use of young people's images can be different and the rules pertaining to photography and films depend on the various contexts that we work in. Next slide please.

In our chapter, we celebrate the no-face approach as part of the solutions. However, we acknowledge that who decides on what represents risks and who decides on what is the acceptable level of risks that young people should take can be problematic if we consider agency. No-face sell things.

Cell films are great because they have their own aesthetics. They challenge viewers'horizons and expectations by forcing them to look at images differently. And we have a beautiful example here from a cell film.

But to be agentic, research should involve young people in deciding what is visually ethical in the images that are. contextually appropriate, especially in conflict areas. We believe that they understand perhaps even better than adults who come from outside their communities what is representing a risk and what isn't. So we argue that agency should be factored in when we negotiate ethics in the design phase and with...

ethics committee because ethics in a way should also be agentic. So by including agency in ethics, it can help us to shift the gaze and ways of looking at research participants, particularly in aid receiving countries. And it can also contribute to dismantle cliches and stereotypes and play a role in decolonizing.

decolonizing, sorry, research practices. Thank you. We will now move on to using cell filming to explore agency in context, a perspective from rural South Africa by Lisa Weisbeck, Relable Mamorstein at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Next, we will move on to There's No Connection Between Us and Our Children at All, pre-screening dialogue as a way to establish intergenerational relationships. Hello everyone. So the authors of chapter 7 in this book are entitled There's No Connection Between Us and Our Children At All.

These are the words of one of the parents who participated. In a pre-screening dialogue, before the school girls, which were our participants, were to facilitate a dialogue with the broader rural community that we worked with, we the researchers normally focus on two phases for example on creating cell films according to the participatory video process and screening the cell films so So we have realized the value of adding a pre-screening dialogue as a step between the self-filming and the screening to test the dialogue with the parents of the participants that we worked with, but also to enable and deepen the intergenerational dialogue about gender-based violence between the parents and the school girls. So... In this chapter, we explored the process and outcome of the pre-screening dialogue.

I hope you will enjoy reading the chapter. Thank you. Hello everyone.

And now we'll move on to the story behind the story, accounts of youth cell filmmakers on their experience of the pandemic. So this chapter specifically addresses how youth used cell filming to document their experiences from the pandemic. The chapter expands on the understanding of cell filming by exploring not just the films themselves, but the discussions and creative decisions that happened around the films.

We posit that by examining the story behind the story, researchers can gain deeper insights into participants'experiences, emotions, and the creative process. So we use this diagram to explain kind of how we looked at the story behind the story in three main parts and we found that firstly situating the cell film so asking participants to give a brief introduction of their cell film really helped to give context to the participants work and it was Secondly, we found that if we ask questions around the creative decisions surrounding the cell films, so what creative choices did you make? And do these creative choices have any specific meaning?

And that gave us really interesting information behind why the participants chose to show their cell film the way that they did. And if there's any kind of more symbolic meaning behind it. behind the choices that they made.

And lastly, the post-screening discussion really helps to give participants an opportunity to make connections between each other. And that gave us information about their pandemic experiences as well. So the chapter generally suggests that self-filming is not just about the final product, the film itself, but also the process, both creative and reflective, and that contributes to social change and knowledge growth. The COVID-19 pandemic made me closer to masks and sanitizers while also separating me from family and financial security.

Today the pandemic continues to live with me. In the morning when I have the same foods as I did during my four-month years. In between classes when I rush to print or sign readings because the textbooks are too expensive.

In transit, when I'd rather travel far away because the groceries are cheaper, and also in the discomfort of silence that I have learned to harbor. In my travels, I'm learning and targeting the secret of the last last phrases. But also, in the cure that I've decided to learn this year, in the quiet practice of hope, and in the pursuit of being there for myself and for my peers.

And so that's just an example of one of the cell films that came out of our work. Thank you. And we'll move on to the next chapter, which is bringing intersectionality theory to life, storing experiences of navigating the triple pandemics through cell filming as activist scholarship. Hi, everyone. So Maureen Nwina here presenting this.

and really excited. I'm currently a PhD candidate out of Toronto, York University. And I really just want to say that I'm so honored that I'm here today and the book launches today because I'm just starting to recruit for my PhD research, which is around self-filming.

So this book is really like godsend. So in... The winter of 2022, we gathered a group of Black women virtually that were impacted by the triple pandemics of HIV, COVID, anti-Black racism to make cell films. So this was between me, my PhD supervisor, Sarah Flicka, who I'm sure cannot be here, and Katie McEntee, who should probably be here, will be here later. So next slide.

And so... It was really an honorable experience. And some of the things we found out from the women were around self-care, some of the challenges that people experienced during the pandemic, around Black joy, resilience, mental health issues. These are the themes that they matched.

And really, so my current proposal for my dissertation actually builds from this. So from this really short... project that we conducted, my proposal is looking at pandemic recovery for Black women and Black women living with HIV and looking at what the pandemic recovery policies, if they're addressing the losses experienced by Black women during the pandemic. And so, as I said, I really don't want to say much, but you'll read it in the chapter, but I think it's really an honor to be here today.

I'm so happy. I'm so excited to read all the amazing things. And I can't wait for my book. I really want to get my book.

Thank you. Okay. Thanks, everyone. So the second section of the book, Technology and Change, draws together a set of chapters that remind us in different ways of the technology of cell phoning through the use of cell phones and other devices.

in an ever-evolving area. So we will hear about various technology-related topics in this section, such as participatory self-film archives, Insta-workshop, the role of social media, specifically TikTok in self-filming, and more. So with this, I'm going to invite Casey Burkholder to introduce a chapter called Reflexivity, Revisiting Three Parts of Tori's Selfie Archives. Good morning.

My name is Casey Burkholder, and I'm an associate professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair at the Department of Education at Concordia. Today, I'm going to be talking about my chapter in the book called reflexively revisiting three participatory cell film archives. When I was writing my doctoral dissertation, I theorized what a participatory visual researcher who engages with cell film method might do with cell films over time and how we might work to bring a more participatory ethos into the practice of archiving. I'd previously worked on a gesture toward a participatory cell film archive with pre-service teachers where they created short cell films that they produced about issues of identity and belonging in the social studies classroom. These teachers produced cell films individually and in small groups and uploaded their cell films to a playlist on YouTube from their individual accounts.

They chose to make their cell films public, unlisted, or privately available. The idea was to share these cell phones with other pre-service teachers who might also benefit from thinking through these ideas in their practice, as well as to highlight the everydayness of cell film method and how it might be used in teaching. But a problem emerged. Linking the cell films to pre-service teachers'individual accounts meant that confidentiality could not be guaranteed. Pre-service teachers liked videos and curated playlists that were in no way connected to the project could also be ascertained in this way.

Because of these problematics, I decided to proceed another way in developing what I thought of as a more participatory approach to the cell film archive for my doctoral work. In that work, I worked with racialized ethnic minorities. my former students to create cell phones about systemic oppression identity belonging and resistance amidst the umbrella revolution together we created we are hong kong 2 a youtube-based archive of cell phone since my dissertation project i've worked with cell phone method to share findings from a community-based research project that sought to highlight the existing and desired sex education that queer youth and non-binary youth in new brunswick need called sequin I also worked with Cell Film Method to disrupt the erasures of queer and trans histories from social studies in New Brunswick called Queer Histories Matter. Each of these projects resulted in the creation of several cell films and a YouTube-based playlist of cell films that I began to think of as a participatory archive.

So in this chapter I explore three interrelated research questions. What might we do with participatory cell film archives? What are the opportunities and ethical challenges to participatory archiving, especially over time? What does it mean to audience the cell films across different audiences, spaces, and contexts over time? I argue that although initially theorized as a participatory space, the three examples of archives that I explore in the chapter do not do quite what I had set out for them to do.

And yet, they offer something for participatory researchers interested in archiving an exhibition to think about. in relation to the curatorial function of the facilitator, time and the archive, and archiving with care. These are important considerations as we think through what we might do with the cell phones that emerge from project over longer periods of time. Thank you. Thank you, Casey.

And the next chapter is Insta-workshop collaborative cell films. I'll let the authors introduce themselves. and the chapter um hello everyone um i will start a slide please so my name is felix um i'm just going to speak to this chapter i'll just give an overview of what the chapter is about and briefly tell you about my project and then allow max to come in to wrap up the conversation So, now you have the slide please.

Alright, so this chapter explores the cell films as collaborative method to engage various communities via community generated workshop. So, these are working with community for community and by community and so if in the on the right hand side of the slide the As part of my PhD, I spent a couple of years working in a community that are solely into recycling glass bottles, into providing or designing fashionable beads as necklaces. So I spent a couple of times with them and as you all can agree to the fact that if you're able to... collaborate with communities by spending the mere fact of spending the time with them and living in a community, you're able to generate the best content from them. So this has been my community because I am originally from Ghana, although I've been living in Australia for some time now.

So this community for ages has been working or creating designs using just glass bottles. So I saw the need to just have them project their stories. So that's an element of having that reflexive practice, which was able to offer them opportunity to really project their voices. And the fact of them providing or making their voices heard clearly means that they're able to represent themselves in the true ways that they want to do it.

And so I, in the second picture, I actually went to live in the community. We spent a couple of weeks to organize some mini workshops. Before that, I did a couple of workshops in the schools, trying to engage some young individuals, training them how to use smartphones to tell their stories. And then So as part of my engagement with the community, we also had to witness the annual festival, which is a big festival that they organize in the community. So I had opportunity to capture those beautiful scenes as well.

So the documentary is called Kokunonichi. It forms part of my PhD artifact. And it's a four-part documentary with each part telling the stories of the crowbow community, which are from in Ghana, from the sub-Saharan Africa.

So the four parts, the part one will tell you about the crowbows and their creative lifestyle. Part two will tell us about the festivals that has the element of beat production. And part three gives us the types of beats.

the glass beads that are produced in this community. And the last bit is where we wrap the whole documentary by celebrating the people, the festivals that is being guided as you can see in the picture. So it's an honor to be part of this book production and this is the second production after my PhD so I'm happy to be part of this team and then I'll hand over to Max. to wrap up the conversation. Thank you, Felix.

Yeah, that's a really great one. So first to start, I acknowledge that I joined you from the land of the Runji people of the Kuli Nation here in Melbourne, Australia. And I think in this context, you're talking about self-filmmaking and storytelling. I think it's good to recognize that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the first, the First Nations culture here, the original storytellers, one of the oldest storytelling traditions in the world.

I think it's really great when Claudia said that when the self-film revision symposium happened, I was like, oh wow, it's like two years ago. And I would also use the opportunity to congratulate Felix to his PhD, because when we joined, he was a candidate and now Dr. Felix's PhD is confirmed. For me, the most interesting thing in Felix's PhD was to think about the editing process. also as a collaborative and very much a reflexive approach. We see lots of collaborative films, but then the editing doesn't really shine through to be that collaborative, and I think that's what Felix demonstrated there.

Just very briefly to sum up the other project you saw before, I'm a smartphone filmmaker, a cell filmmaker. There was some project that I produced before which were really about bringing the voice of the community to the foreground. One was called Eva in a Tour, which was made with a...

National Council for Women in Rarotonga, Pacific Islands, and then one project at the Jersey Shore in the US, which was about the impact of Hurricane Jersey on the Jersey Shore and the people, the community, how they got together and helped themselves in that difficult situation. And I think some of the things, as much as Felix Films was there, to really think about the reflexivity of the storytelling process and creating the film as a conversation with the community and a dialogue rather than as a filmmaker. telling the story, telling the story with the people as a dialogue.

And this has now in this chapter been written up as a methodology that also works very well for online collaborations and collaborative cell films. And there are three examples here. One was the project with the Goethe Institute in New Zealand, Aotearoa, which was on making cell films for a better climate.

The key thing there to highlight is that we can only tackle things like climate change if everyone can contribute to this and we understand what people's perceptions and ideas about climate and the environment are. And then there's two other projects. One was commissioned by the Department for Land and Water in Victoria, Australia, where we looked at the future of Melbourne.

and one with the Australian Cross to identify what humanitarian action would be. And so in these projects you also utilize the idea of Instagram so that these conversations can continue in the future as well using these platforms. And I just really would like to also thank again for that you could be part of this really great symposium and this really great book now.

Thank you. Thank you so much Felix and Max and congratulations Felix. for your PhD.

I was using this digital clap sign, but I noticed that nobody sees it. Congratulations. Okay. Oh, okay. So the next chapter, the title is Exploring TikTok as the Everyday Self-Im.

And I'm just passing the mic to the author. Thank you, Hani. Good morning, everyone. Happy Tuesday. I'm very excited about this book launch and to be participating in it with everyone.

My name is Sarah Modio and I'm a PhD candidate at McGill. This chapter, Exploring TikTok as the Everyday Cell Foam, looked to unpack some of my experiences as a teacher researcher working in adult secondary schools in Quebec. It aimed to breathe life into the interactions I'm privy to inside the classroom, which I'm actually inside my classroom right now. In this chapter, I look at nuances of the social media application TikTok to consider how the participatory visual methodology of cell filming is evolving in society.

And the research question I was hoping to answer was, can content created on TikTok be understood to be the evolution of cell filming in culture and society? In this chapter, reflections appear as accounts of the production of two cell films that were created by my students in adult education secondary school in Montreal, Quebec. These students'age ranged between 18 and 40, and most were immigrant and refugee students.

Reflective accounts allowed for us to look back at experiences in relation to other broader social contexts and gain greater awareness about their realities. They were recalled through one guiding question. What was the production process? We used photo voice intermixed into the reflections as three images that were taken during the production process.

And these images serve to provide visuals and perceptions into meanings that were attributed to them. This chapter looks at the necessity for cell phone research to evolve. with the technologies present on mobile devices and in mobile spheres.

Reflective research opens the door for us to investigate these topics that emerge in our day-to-day existence. And then finally, the data of this text was looked at through two reflexive accounts about the process of creating cell phones. They were analyzed through thematic coding, and three themes emerged. Tensions in power, health, politics, and misinformation, and the power of visual texts and the aesthetics on TikTok.

The app so far has taught us through this chapter that there is something very compelling about concise communication and that the aesthetic options available on the app might actually be more important than the message in the video curations. And thank you for having me here. Thank you so much, Sarah. And the last but not least chapter on this section is cell phones beyond the workshop, youth researchers owning gender transformative change.

through participatory visual research in rural India during COVID-19. I'm not sure who from the authors will take the mic. Probably Katie?

Katie! Katie! Thanks, Hani.

Yeah, my name is Katie McEntee. I'm a research associate at the University of Guelph and other places. And I'm very honored to be speaking on behalf of this chapter alongside...

well, Rukmini Panda, who unfortunately couldn't join us today, and Claudia Mitchell, who I believe you probably are all familiar with. Next slide, please. So this chapter starts by recognizing various criticisms of participatory visual methodologies, ranging from the ways in which the representation of the work might be overly celebratory and risks being tokenistic, as well as the very practical concerns in relation to access to the technology needed to implement these methods such as mobile phones or tablets, data coverage and airtime.

We're really interested in communities in which cell phone access is limited and where participatory visual methods that are meant to engage young people may be actually exclusionary in practice. So we take what we termed a beyond the workshop approach to youth led research in considering a feminist oriented research intervention that addressed gender based violence and sexual and reproductive health rights with rural young people in India. that included giving cell phones to its 20 participants. The study started with an Inception workshop in 2019, during which the youth researchers learned how to use their newly acquired cell phones to engage in photovoice and cell phone method to investigate gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health rights.

And it became more complex when only a few months after the workshop and the youth researchers returned to their rural communities to conduct research, COVID-19 plunged the world into lockdown. So the public health restrictions added an unforeseen dynamic to the research by limiting the research team's interactions with the youth and in so doing offered a unique opportunity to deepen understandings of what ownership of both the cell phone and the issues could mean for participatory visual researchers and specifically youth researchers. So next slide please.

So the Beyond the Workshop findings demonstrate how cell phone access supports feminist research by shifting ownership to the research process to the participants and makes possible participant-led advocacy. Being able to work independently with their cell phones in their communities, youth researchers explored a really broad range of issues and decided on how to use cell film and photo voice methods to advance women's rights and gender equality. Methodologically, the youth researchers'ownership of the research process was demonstrated in their mobilization efforts during COVID-19. The organization of community interventions, meetings with community leaders, as well as their increased personal comfort in talking about sexual and reproductive health rights and gender-based violence all demonstrated to us the way that the youth researchers'ownership, really took ownership over advocacy and taking advocacy. Now, program...

programmatically, the challenges of this increased ownership were really mainly ethical in nature. Knowledge mobilization activities were at times uncomfortable and challenging, especially given the taboo nature of the topics that the youth were discussing. And the chapter concludes with several recommendations towards expanding and supporting youth's substantive ownership of the research process through and with their ownership of cell phones provided through research interventions.

So we further argue that youth researchers'work is concrete evidence that investing in cell phones and internet access for participants strengthens their project's theoretical commitment to social justice. And in this case, gender equality and women's rights specifically. And the project really allowed the projects that allow for the purchase of cell phones at airtime for participants are taking active steps to decolonize research by counteracting extractive research practices.

And they're recognizing that the cell phone has exponential value beyond the workshop for young people seeking to meaningfully engage and sustainably engage in gender transformative change. Thank you. Thank you, Katie.

So this brings us to the end of part two of the book, and I'm going to pass the mic to Lisa to introduce part three. Thank you, Hani, and thank you for our previous presenters. I'm pleased to introduce the third section of the book, focusing on pedagogy and facilitating self-filming.

We're very fortunate that we have five incredible chapters in this section, ranging from a focus on critical digital literacy to the work that's happening internationally at various NGOs. So we're very lucky to have, I think, the majority of the authors with us today. So instead of hearing from me, I'd like to hand it over to the authors, starting with Aaron Rosenberg, who will be sharing his chapter, Institutional Ethnography and Self-Filming, Supporting Critical Digital Literacy Practices in Secondary Education. Thanks so much, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be here today with all of you.

And I especially want to express my appreciation to the editors. Lisa was my master's supervisor and then Claudia was my co-supervisor for the PhD. So I feel like this whole book is a very, it's a fun sort of coming together of a lot of different aspects of my research experience.

Next slide, please. My approach to cell filming was based on the work of Dorothy Smith, who founded an approach to sociology called institutional ethnography. Institutional ethnography, or IE, is an approach to research that instead of trying to research about participants, it invites participants to research with the researcher about another topic. So a lot of the types of participatory research that we've heard about already today sort of fits within this frame where it's not about trying to think of your research participants as the research subjects. or objects, I guess, but rather their co-collaborators on the research journey.

In the next minute or two, I'm going to share a little bit about why I think cell filming is such an appropriate approach to this type of participatory research. Next slide, please. So as we just heard from Katie, this isn't always the case where digital tools are something that young people or the participants in our research are very familiar with.

but the students that I was working with were here in Canada, in British Columbia, and so the idea of using cell phones and digital technologies that they were already quite familiar with allowed them to take ownership of the research process in a similar way to how Katie described with the students or with the participants she was working with. I especially appreciate because my research was about digital tools and how to think more critically about our uses of these tools, the way that cell phones are both a tool that we're using to do the research, but also they're the focus of the research. So it was a bit of a meta approach to use cell filming to explore cell phone tools. The other piece that I think is so important about using digital tools for a participatory project is the way in which cell phones and new digital tools allow us to have more of an interactive experience with media.

As Jenkins et al wrote in 2009, new media technologies make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. However, as the internet becomes more controlled by big tech corporations, it's harder for the average consumer to have a kind of choose-your-own-adventure approach to their internet experience. So this research both tried to capitalize on this participatory potential of digital tools, but also explore the way that that can be limited or challenging.

Finally, because cell phone films aren't just a documentary, but also have some sort of an arts-based approach, I feel like they're actually able to affect change in a way that makes people feel things and can actually change behaviors. I love this quote from Claudia, where she writes that if we think that change is always about someone else or about some division of policymaking out there, we fail to recognize that all of us who engage in research, visual or otherwise, are already in positions to affect some change or some social action somewhere. Bringing students'cell phone experiences into the research process reminded them that it's not just in educational settings that they can make this change, but actually all the times when they're using their phone to communicate or to post things, that's also part of this process of trying to impact their community and their friends and family. And then the last slide please. So I didn't prepare a cell film to share with all of you today because my students or my participants didn't ask.

preferred for them to be private. But some of the topics that we ended up exploring with students around cell phones with the cell films were things like online harassment, the environmental issues inherent in digital tools, the way that beauty standards or body image are explored or validated or challenged in online spaces, the exploitative labor involved in the mining, manufacturing, e-waste, all the different stages in the tech life cycle, the way that big tech influences young people's online consumer behaviors, like with algorithms and whatnot. students'challenges with the device overuse and the way that data is gathered on them while they're using digital devices.

And here there's an image of some of the storyboards students used. I just want to close by, again, expressing my appreciation not only for all the editors and all the collaborators who wrote chapters, but also everyone else here who's here to learn and to listen. And especially a shout out to Angela and the team at the PCL for all the behind-the-scenes tech work.

Because as we're exploring technology, it's not just about the content, but also this the formal features. So thanks for this really beautiful event today. Thank you, Aaron. Well said.

So next, we have Cassandra Jones, whose chapter Re-Embodying Education, Sensory and Visual Methodologies of Cell Film and Walking with Video focuses on enhancing the capacity for sensory-based learning and pedagogical frameworks for incorporating walking in cell films. Thank you so much, Lisa. I'm Cassandra Jones.

I'm a PhD candidate at McGill and a student of Dr. Claudia Mitchell. May I please have the next slide? All right, so methodologies in conversation.

My chapter focused on putting two participatory visual methodologies in conversation, cell film and walking with video. For me, cell filming draws on Pink's notion of walking with video. For her, this is a phenomenological research method that attends to sensorial elements of human experience and place name.

As a simple method, this means walking with... and video recording research participants as they experience, tell, and show their material, immaterial, and social environments in personally, socially, and culturally specific ways. That's Pink in 2007. For this workshop, I drew on both cell phone and walking with video methodologies to create a hybrid method to which I refer to as walking cell phones.

Claudia generously invited me to lead this workshop. in her class where I was also a student. So the workshop, Re-Embodying Education Through Walking Cell Phones, my aim was to have participants use a hybrid approach called walking cell phones to extend visual methodology into the realm of sensory and experiential learning to move towards the goals of transformative education.

The students engaged with the following overarching research questions. How do you use your senses? and sensorially experience the neighborhood environment. Is a neighborhood an accessible space? What do you have access to in this neighborhood and what do you not have access to?

These research questions and set of prompts were designed to help the researcher participants harness a visual methodology to think through their senses and use their feeling bodies that are often silenced or ignored in research and educational contexts. as ways of generating knowledge and participating in the field and in this way re-embody education. When this workshop took place we were still in the pandemic and we were in a virtual classroom all together.

Many of us had never met each other and so I really wanted people to go out into the neighborhood and kind of re-embody and experience places that we had lost touch to in the pandemic. So I'd like to share four succinct highlights on the next slide please. So these are four highlights that emerged leading to the theoretical development of this approach and a rich opportunity for transformative learning in relation to the social issues students experience both sensorially and environmentally within their local neighborhoods. And these neighborhoods kind of act as our field site. So the first is sensate researchers.

I asked students to use their bodies to gather data. What does it feel like, smell like, the visuals? This form of using their body enabled them to become sensate researchers.

The second is walking cell phones. So in putting cell phone conversation with walking video, this approach of walking cell phones emerged, which is kind of expanded upon and discussed in the chapter. And then three, it led to sensory-in-place learning.

So this called what Howes refers to, again, as sensory-in-place learning and sensory-in-place knowing. The connection between mind-body environment. As they move through their neighborhoods, they learn sensorially and experientially and enacted forms of placemaking. And fourth, this led to sensory-based cell phone pedagogy.

as they were asked to go into the neighbourhoods beyond the virtual classroom of the pendek, an often disembodied state, to participate in re-embodying their learning. And so I'll conclude with the chapter provides the research questions and prompts to kind of showcase the structure of leading this workshop with students. I'd like to thank everyone involved in the book for this beautiful opportunity and this wonderful book launch today. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Cassandra. Next, we have the chapter Getting Ready to Cell Film, Training the Team to Work with Adolescents to Create Cell Films to Support Intergenerational Dialogue in Bauchi State in Nigeria. And we have authors Anne Cockcroft, Umaira Ansari. Khaled Omer and Yagana Gadado talking about the unique perspective on self-helming pedagogy and the challenges of collaborating with adolescents and community members.

Thanks very much. Hello everyone. I'm Anne Cockroft.

I'm part of the academic unit of participatory research at McGill. But the chapter is about cell filming in Bouchy, as you've mentioned. When we began our chapter in 2002, we were real newbies to cell filming.

We've been doing participatory research for decades. It's our identity. And in fact, we've used visual methods to share and discuss findings, producing short 10 to 20 minutes.

docudramas, but we had no experience of cell filming. Oh, wait a minute, I'm getting a message about changing to a different language. I don't know what that means. Our chapter describes how we address the challenges that we faced to train a sizable team of about 20 young people in northern Nigeria.

We needed to train them not only to make cell films themselves, but they also needed to be able to train and support adolescents in rural... I think I need the next slide, sorry. Yes, we also needed to be able to train them to train and support adolescents in rural communities to create cell films and share them with their parents and community leaders.

The cell films were on the overall topic of adolescent sexual and reproductive health and different issues within that. In our chapter we describe how we trained ourselves with a little help from our friends in the participatory cultures lab at McGill, and then we trained the team of young people. It was a stepwise process.

Oh, yes, okay. All right, we've got the things I was going to mention. It was a stepwise process.

One big help was to run a mini cell film festival in Bouchy for their creations, and that was an enormous help. We were left with questions. How would our trained young team cope? with training adolescents for cell filming at scale?

And how would the community leaders and parents respond to the cell films for the young people? What would be the transformative impact of creating and sharing cell films on the adolescents themselves and other stakeholders? And could we measure it?

So next slide, please. So I'm taking the liberty of going briefly beyond what we wrote in our chapter. because it's now 2024. So the first thing is that, if you could click please, our training equipped the young team pretty well. Since 2023 they've trained and supported 540 adolescents who've created and shared 120 cell films in 30 communities.

It's been wonderful to watch them blossom into such effective trainers and and mentors for the adolescents. Could I have the next, if you click again? The community leaders have indeed, they've responded well, they paid attention to the cell films and to their creators, it's changed their views, it's shifted their perceptions about the young people, they've listened to them and now they're working with them to tackle agreed priority concerns around ASRH. I don't think... this intergenerational connection would have happened without the cell films.

We've had no negative reactions, even when the cell films are covering pretty sensitive topics. Click once more please. It's clear to us that this has been a transformative experience for the adolescents and for other stakeholders.

We're trying to measure this using both questionnaires and narratives of change. So I want to finish by saying watch this space for the results. Thank you very much.

much. Thank you, Anne. Next time, I'm pleased to hand this over to two delightful colleagues that I work very closely with, Claudia Mitchell, whom many of you work very closely with as well, and Jennifer Thompson, who are going to discuss the chapter that we contributed to the book titled Revisioning as Practice in Cell Filming in Sierra Leone.

A reflexive account of addressing gender transformation in the moment, where we focused on the notion of learning in the moment as a framework for a pedagogy of facilitation in self-filming. And then we'll also share insights into storyboarding as intervention and emerging genres of self-filming workshops. So Jen, take it away. Thanks, Lisa.

So I'm Jen Thompson. I'm a research associate with Transform, presenting on behalf of Claudia and Lisa. Our chapter draws on a four-day workshop that we co-facilitated in Sierra Leone in 2022 in collaboration with Code to support teachers in the use of cell filming to address gender transformation in their teaching.

Often in cell film workshops, we've seen how screening participants'cell films can elicit laughter, some clapping, sometimes some knee slapping, and lots of critical questions and comments about the topics that are taken up and the issues that are in the cell films. But in this particular workshop, the first round of cell films sort of fell flat. It didn't really have that effect. So our chapter takes up the pedagogy of facilitation and to showcase three examples of adaptations that we co-developed with participants as we learned in the moment how to revision self-filming with this group. Next slide, please.

First, we developed tailored large format storyboards on flip chart paper. Typically, we print blank storyboard templates on sort of letter sized. paper or A4 paper with minimal structure.

But in the moment we realized that the larger format, just making it bigger, made the group process more accessible for participants to gather around and contribute their ideas to their cell phone. The tailored guidance within the different sections of the storyboard, within the storyboard itself, was helpful. with clarity around the different genres that we were working with like media message cell films and interview cell films.

Next slide please. Second, to overcome sound challenges which I'm sure most people are familiar with, participants developed what we saw as a new genre that we hadn't seen before in our work and that we're calling the narrative voiceover. So in the moment, participants figured out that having one person narrate behind the camera while others performed on camera helped to circumvent some of the sort of persistent challenges, sound challenges like background noise and the low quality microphones on the tablets that we were using.

At third, inspired by Daphne and Tomaselli's work on cell phones as being fit for the smaller screen, In the moment, we had participants re-screen their cell phones on the tablets. We didn't project them. We just had groups work with tablets to re-screen their cell phones with some questions to support participants to reflect on what they might want to improve in their cell phones, and then an opportunity to re-shoot their cell phones, which resulted in stronger cell phones with clearer messages and more laughter and clapping and critical questions. So we'd like to leave you with one of these cell phones made by pre-service teachers to address their concerns about early marriage and it's called She's Too Young. Next slide.

Greetings Mama Haja. I am here to be a bride for your daughter, to be my fifth wife. No, she's too young.

Yes, I'm too young. She's too young. She's too young.

I'm too young. She's too young. Yes, she's too young.

Say no to early marriage. Thanks, Jen. I always get a little bit of goosebumps when I see that self-film, and I'm sure many of you who are re-watching some of the ones that you've included have a similar reaction.

Finally for this section, and I think it's an appropriate way to kind of close on the book chapters, Nessa Bandarcharian-Rashti and Claudia Mitchell will be sharing a chapter that is a conversation or discussion amongst panelists from three. or from several international NGOs, Code, Plan Canada and Oxfam, describing how cell filming is being used in their respective organizations. Thanks. Thanks, Lisa.

I'm not sure. Nessa, are you here? I'm not sure if Nessa's here. I think I'm here.

I'm here for us. OK, so, yeah, this is this is the last chapter in the book, but far from being the last chapter. I think it became the first chapter of a new book or a new life.

But one of the things that has been really so... exciting, I think, in the last couple of years is working with Plan, Oxfam, Code, Equitas to realize how NGOs are taking up cell filming, how they're supporting it, and how they're seeing this work in interventions and advocacy. And one of the special moments, I guess, of the special opportunities in the symposium was to have this involvement of NGOs talking about this work and their presence there. And I think that's a really important part of the work.

One of the sessions that we convened was a conversation facilitated by Catherine Vanner, who is from the University of Windsor. And I'll just maybe turn to the next slide. She came up with these four questions.

You know, how did you first learn about cell filming and what made you think it would be a good fit for your NGO? Why do you think it's a useful tool? Does it have any kind of different uses or different purposes or value in work as opposed to in research?

How does it? respond to the risk of tokenism and manipulation and whether it mediates that in any way? And then do you see cell filming as a way of challenging and subverting some of the conventional frameworks and gender norms? So these were like really powerful questions.

The session was only one hour, I think, but like the data coming out of this. So Nessa and I decided to turn it into a chapter with the consent of all of the speakers. And of course, we also learned how difficult it is to turn the spoken word into the written word sometimes, to hang on to the messages, but to make sure that there was always context there. And the chapter, I think the comments, the words of Aishak Sharif from Plan, Deborah Simpson, who was then working with Code, and Ratba Natia, who is, Natia, pardon me, who is still working, I believe, with Oxfam, they're just like gems. And they just started off a whole train of new thoughts.

And that's why I say that really it's the last chapter in the book, but it ended up being a new chapter. Because out of that work in 2022, and going back to doing more work with code in Sierra Leone and the project that Jen just... described, we hatched a plan to develop a partnership grant funded by SSHRC, or proposed to SSHRC, and this particular event was also funded by SSHRC, to try to think through how would researchers who are passionate about participatory visual methodologies and working with young people and NGOs who are passionate about advocacy and social change and working with young people How could we come together as part of a project? So I say it as the last chapter and the first chapter, because it was out of that work that we designed the whole new project called Transform, engaging with young people for social change.

And the central place of the NGO world in that project is just so absolutely critical. So we're just going to end with the last slide. And you have to...

You have to imagine a drum roll on this. This is another box and it is the birth of Transform. Drum roll. Okay, all right. Ta-da!

Okay, so that's our last slide for that particular piece. Thank you. Thanks.

So thank you everybody and congratulations to all the authors. I just realized, did Labo join later or not? No.

Okay. All right. So thank you and congratulations to all the authors.

We have a couple of minutes for some Q&A, for some opportunities for people to engage in any dialogue. So maybe we can just take the screen down and see if there's some burning questions in the, many of you heard. the original papers that led to these chapters but you didn't necessarily get the chapter until um you received your book if you received your book and we're going to talk about that too but any questions or comments um yeah there is one from azam in the um okay oh i got it direct message i'm just going to read it out and i think it's a general question so anyone who feels uh they have a comment on it just please jump in you As Am says, with regard to the question of power, knowledge, epistemology and methodology, the pressing dilemma is who is the knower? Ethical codes such as omitting faces or manipulating images through editing under the pretext of protecting individuals could in some cases systematically silence marginalized voices. So who is the knower?

Are ethical codes set in stone or should they, based on various theories, including Donna Harway's theory of situated knowledge, be critically questioned through reflexivity? In this context, do the images reveal or conceal? It's like an incredible thesis statement. Just go to the if anyone wants to.

Yeah, go ahead. Angela, is it possible to put the question in the chat? Sure.

Thank you. Okay. Anyone want to have a go at that?

Oh, Aaron, yay, go for it. What made me think about the difference between doing this type of research in communities where all the participants are already very familiar with cell phones and technology, digital technologies, whereas a lot of the chapters in the book are in communities where the researcher brings the technology to the community. And I think that question that was posed about who is controlling this process and what does that look like is so important because everyone, regardless of our...

participants comfort with digital tools really wants our participants to be the voices that are centered so I think it's a really important question for us to keep thinking about in whatever context. Maureen do you want to take a thanks Erin Maureen do you have your hand raised do you want to contribute there? Yeah I wasn't going to contribute to that but I'm just going to like Angela Mcdonald's post and I think back to Aaron's presentation on ethnography. Honestly, I'm kind of new in self-filming and it's so exciting. I started hearing about it in my master's course with South Africa and then I decided, you know, it makes sense.

But I like as I'm developing, I've just completed my flyers and I'm doing recruitment. And I think because my research is with black women living with HIV, some of the questions that for me I've been thinking about are the same questions that have been presented here. especially around ethical dilemmas, around confidentiality, around, you know, I think the presentation around faces, keeping the faces out is really like, so all I want to say that I'm, in fact, just this morning, I've learned a lot from everybody's presentation.

So thank you, everyone. Despite that there was shot, but I think I learned a lot. I'm just wondering if those presentations will be, I know you said there'll be a video, if they'll be all together and we can have access to it, because I really want to go back to that.

But really, I'm so excited. I can now kind of picture how I want to do my research and have more like concrete plan on it because, you know, it's the right time. So, again, I'm so thankful and I'm excited and I cannot appreciate how amazing it is that this book.

got launched at this particular moment. Thanks so much, Maureen. Just to address the question of the video, we will be going back to all of the people who spoke today, just to make sure if there's any concerns about sharing the video.

If there is, obviously we won't share your piece, but the idea is to have this available after the fact. Shannon? Yeah, I just wanted to briefly say when I read this question. It really made me think a lot about Prudence's and Josh's chapter in regards to supporting children in making cell films. And I think this question, too, could be explored further by by looking at that chapter in the ways that they ask questions about how do we support participants or in this case children?

And and when we do, are we? are we employing our voices onto that information? So it's definitely an important consideration. And I think that, yeah, I have something to say chapter addresses that quite a bit as well.

Prudence, please. I was so glad you put your hand up because I cut you off and I didn't mean to when you were speaking. So please go ahead. Thank you so much. Thank you for your comment, Shannon.

I think it's an important piece in the work that we did, Josh and me together. I just wanted to say that the cell phone that I screened was actually a cell phone that was made in a facility where there was about, I think, like seven or eight teams of children that worked together. And this team worked with the mother of one of the children.

She was there to make the cell phone with them. And like it happened that another mother, because two are siblings, was also there. And so she was able to give consent.

Both parents were able to give consent for the faces of children, but this created a situation because all the other children of the daycare that couldn't have their faces, because we adopted a no-face approach in the first place, and all the other children started to say, well, it's not fair. Why do they have their faces and we can't have it? So that really brought us to reflect on that. on that question and i just wanted to add like i i put it in the chat but i i think maybe it's good that it's in the video um that the message because the cell phone was in french so the message that the children want to wanted to say uh the the topic was uh uh it's not fair and uh the message was pollution breaks the homes of animals i just wanted to say it in english for people that don't speak French, and to carry the message of the children, which is the most important.

Thank you. All right, well that just about brings us to the end. I do want to say that I mentioned at the very beginning that this is actually the launch of a brand new series within Transform called the Transform Learning Series, and if you like this, come back on October the 9th for the next The next episode, which comes out of the Transform Project, a dialogue on youth leadership and research. You'll be joining Naomi Nichols from Trent University, Jane Mellenfall from McGill, Lebo Moletsani from UKZN, and some young people from various projects will, I think, be part of this as well. But it will be a two-hour dialogue on ways of working and engaging with young people in exactly the kinds of questions that...

Azam and others have raised in terms of ethical issues and beyond the workshop and during the workshop and how do we do this work. So we're excited to launch this. And if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to email us, come back to us. And just to say once again to everybody, thank you so much for being here.

To all the authors, thank you. This was like, it was like just listening to everybody today. I'm feeling like, oh. It was such a rich collection, and it joins the amazing collection that Katie and Sarah Flicker just co-authored last year, as well as the groundbreaker, What's a Cell Film Anyway? Is that the right title?

Katie and Josh and Casey from 2016. And many more coming. This is like, we just keep writing these things. It just makes a big literature to review for a new doctoral student. So sorry for you, Maureen, but you'll just have to review more books and more publications. So once again, thank you, everybody.

This was an absolute pleasure. What a great morning. I'm so excited.

Okay, so yay! Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Stay in touch. And thanks, Lisa.

Shannon and Hany, your amazing co-editors on this project. Thanks, Claudia. Bye.

Bye. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Bye. And the next in October.

Yes, October the 9th. Come back.

Transcript for:Celebrating the Launch of a New Book

Transcript for:
Celebrating the Launch of a New Book