Participatory Video and Situated Ethics: Avoiding Disablism

Abstract

This chapter considers the adaptations which may need to be made to participatory video in order for it to be accessible to people whose marginalized status stems from a label of 'disability', whether this is physical, sensory or cognitive. To date there has been an ill fit between the emancipatory principles of participatory video, and the technical rationality (Schön, 1996) and hypercognitivity (Post, 2000) of its methods. Because participatory video is intended to enable marginalized, socially excluded and unheard groups of people to make films which reflect their own interests and concerns (Robertson & Shaw, 1997), adaptations to allow people with disabilities to take part would appear vital from an ethical point of view. Yet ethical issues in general do not appear to have been given sufficient consideration in the participatory video literature to date, and there is little evidence of engagement with emergent areas of debate such as the ethics of visual research (Prosser, 2008) and the importance of working in solidarity with people with reduced or fluctuating mental capacity (Nuffield Council for Bioethics, 2009).