This project is applying our polyphonic documentary methods to a community setting. We had our participants’ screening last week to share work in progress and will be launching the project more publicly in the autumn/winter, after working with it in a curated workshop setting over the summer. It is an evolving project, as we are tweaking the interface design in response to user testing, thinking carefully about different audience needs/responses and extending the interdisciplinary research collaboration that underpins it.
The project is authored in Stornaway.io and is pushing the software in new directions, moving it away from a branched narrative structure towards more of a thematically-led set of filmed testimonies layered in place. These testimonies (collated from long-form ethnographic interviews) articulate different perspectives and points of view about Avonmouth, as seen from a selection of long-standing residents, relatively recent incomers, community leaders, and local businesses.
The clips average a minute each in length and are selected as unedited short testimonies from thirteen contributors. There are seventy eight clips in total, arranged across three ‘levels’ which explore: the present as well as aspects of the past (Living in Avonmouth); the efforts made to change the present (Making a Difference); and thoughts – from those same contributors – as they envisage Avonmouth in the future (Looking Ahead).
Avonmouth is an industrialised suburb, situated eleven kilometres downstream from the centre of Bristol. It grew up around the Port of Bristol and still retains a village feel, in spite of the surrounding industry. The Port and its hinterland are of strategic importance for the import/export of goods, energy distribution/production and waste management. As such, the area is a hot spot for the transition to net zero, with Bristol having been the first city in the UK to declare a climate emergency, committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2030.
Our project is responding to this commitment by focusing on Avonmouth’s role in this process. By working with the Community Centre and other associated organisations, such as St Andrew’s Church and the SevernNet social enterprise, we are supporting the work that is already being done to bring a rapidly changing community together and to improve dialogue between the community and the surrounding business interests.
With this is mind, our work is dialogic in nature. It is also grounded in anthropological fieldwork and an ethos of deep listening. For the first stage of this project, we received a small grant of £11,000 from the University of the West of England’s Impact Accelerator Account, which has come from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. This funding enabled Karen Boswall to be commissioned to work on the project, building on a collaboration developed through the Polyphonic Documentary project.
As a filmmaker and researcher with over thirty years of experience in documentary production, Karen has been instrumental in pulling this project together. It also would not have happened without the support of my PhD student, Rengin Gurel Ozmen, who has a background in design and is working with this project as a case study for bringing interactive documentary methods into design education.
Other members of the team, who have been less engaged on a daily basis but whose contribution has nonetheless been invaluable are: Abby Tabor, a Senior Lecturer at UWE Bristol with a background in Psychology and a strong interest in ethnographic research methods as applied to Health and Wellbeing, and Bharath Ananthanarayana, another of my PhD students, who is applying interactive documentary methods to his fieldwork on ginger cultivation in the Western Ghats region of India.
As Project Lead, I initiated the project, built the team and continue to steer its overall direction, alongside being deeply embedded in the ongoing fieldwork that is driving this project forwards. What has been particularly pleasing has been the alignment of values and aesthetic approaches that has been experienced between all team members to date. This has been helped by our collective engagement with the Polyphonic Documentary project and by our shared involvement in both the design and filming stages of the project.
The central focus of this project is to support a just transition to net zero in and around Avonmouth, building on foresight and futures thinking. The project is ongoing and the team will be evolving as it progresses to its next stage. As we don’t yet have a website, we have made a short visually pleasing descriptor of our work, which hints at our interface design.
We are very much looking forward to sharing further updates and to hearing more about other related projects through future Polyphonic Documentary convenings.
Judith
Polyphonic Documentary 