Howard Rheingold, a brilliant lecturer at UC Berkeley and Stanford and author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution is a major influence in our thinking about what internet-mediated video can do for public health research and advocacy. Howard Rheingold writes, and I completely agree, about the salience of this historical moment in technological and social change.

“If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty-first-century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates)” (Rheingold, 2008, pp 99-100)

His talk at the TED conference — viewable here — encapsulates some of the thrilling possibilities for democracy, collaboration, and (in my mind) health promotion in our century.

Map of Central City, New Orleans

Tons of community-based participatory research (CBPR) authors and practitioners raise the issue of defining community in CBPR. Several authors in Minkler’s edited book Community-Based Participatory Research for Health speak to the centrality of recognizing and defining community (2003). In Lawrence Green and colleagues’ “Guidelines for Participatory Research in Health Promotion”, they argue that the first question that must be asked of CBPR practitioners is: “Is the community of interest clearly described or defined?” Israel and colleagues write that the first key principle of CBPR is “CBPR recognizes community as a unit of identity”. So, what is community in the New Orleans VideoVoice project? Sometimes I know and sometimes I don’t.

As we walk through the process of recruitment for our project, I realize just how complex the idea of community really is. For example, when we began, it seemed as if this was a pretty cut and dry case of neighborhood = community. In fact, one of the rare pleasures of doing CBPR work in New Orleans, as far as I’ve experienced it, is that many people really do identify strongly with the neighborhoods where they live. Many have lived in the same home, some for several generations. People seem to know the people who live around them, to go to church with them, to have attended high school with them, and many even attend regular neighborhood committee meetings. Well, that was, until Katrina. So, it’s complicated.

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Check out these new research articles, particularly the first one, for some very helpful info about the way that digital structures, policies, and culture impact its use and its utility for advancing public health and wellbeing.

Structures of Participation in Digital Culture. A new SSRC edited volume on culture, technology, and power in the digital era.  The book comes out of the Culture, Creativity, and Information Technology program, which focused on changing forms of cultural agency and the changing roles of cultural institutions.  Full text available free online (and for sale!)

The Bellagio Global Dialogues on Intellectual Property, or, How to Build an International Policy Research Field.  A report on Rockefeller Foundation IP Policy Initiatives, 2001-2006.

I just undertook a big big thing: a literature review of all the articles on participatory video for health.  This will be most interesting to academic researchers, particularly those that practice community-based and action-oriented approaches to research. I will tell you about how I selected and excluded articles and what I found out about participatory video. In future posts, I will also talk about my findings on photovoice, a participatory approach to research and photography.  As you will see, I did a lot of looking and at the end of the day, only came up with 3 scholarly articles on this topic.  So, good news for new research ideas and bad news for people needing research now!

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Kole Ade Odutola from the University of Florida sent us this very heartfelt poem about participatory video called “Participatory Use of Video in Verse: A Prodigal Child”.  I’ve actually never seen a poem about participatory video, so I was excited to include this in a blog!

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Have you ever created a word or excel document with a bunch of website addresses, just so you wouldn’t forget them all? Have you ever sent a friend or colleague a bunch of links that you ran across, because you knew it was right up their alley? Is it getting hard for you to manage the hundreds of bookmarks that you saved on browser? Well… then you were working a lot harder than you have to! Online bookmarking makes all of this easier. And, as a doctoral student that spends a lot of time finding resources on the web, this has helped me to stay sane… and even be helpful to other researchers in my field.

Here is an excerpt by Lisa Pickoff-White from our Participatory Media Guidebook, which I describe in the last blog, explaining what bookmarking is and how to use it to make your life easier.

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