Edinburgh Napier University

  This paper will discuss Community Media as a networked knowledge practice through which participants mediate identity. It draws on examples from a community video project directed by the author on the Isle of Bute on the West coast of Scotland, supported by the Scottish Centre for Island Studies at The University of the West of Scotland.
During The Bute Video Project residents were supported to make short documentary videos on the island. The collaborative project acted as an agency through which participants mediated notions of place, and island-ness (Baldacchino, 2006).
As a practitioner engaged in practice-led and ethnographically informed research, I am interested in examining techniques of practice and production and ways in which participatory and community based media foreground the “the relational aspects of filmmaking” (Grimshaw and Ravetz, 2005). The Bute Video Project reveals community media productions as embedded in networks of relations that act as a catalyst for knowledge exchange and a re-imagining of place, revealing Bute as an island with multiple identities and descriptions. Here production roles are fore-grounded, with personal experience, relations and situated knowledge at the core of the production process.
This production process is as an ongoing social process – a personal and collaborative process where participants and I negotiated and performed a range of roles that were informed by pre existing networks of relations on the island and beyond, and which developed during and informed the course of production.