Images, activism, education and research: The uses of audiovisual by self-managed, autonomous groups in Argentina today

FLURY, JORGELINA; HERAS MONNER SANS, ANA INÉS; BURIN, DAVID; ACOSTA, CECILIA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; Visual Sociology Academic Sessions FORUM; 2012

International Sociology Association

This paper is of collective authorship, born out of the work we are conducting as a team in two action-research studies: Learning and creation and Learning and perception of difference in self-managed autonomous projects . Since our team is composed of people from diverse disciplinary areas (ethnography, audiovisual communication, education, economy) we conduct collaborative action-research work by using several different means of documenting and analyzing everyday practice with autonomous, self-managed collectives . Mainly we use video, photography and written and oral narrative. However, we have found that there is scarce reflection, at least in Spanish, about what is at work when self-managed autonomous projects are documented using audiovisual means, more so if we contrast that (lack of) reflection with the amount of visual production indeed generated (by and about self-managed autonomous groups). Therefore two main ideas frame the work presented here: 1) There is a need to continually reflect about the use of several different languages (oral, written, visual and audiovisual) at use by (and about) the experience of self-managed autonomous groups. 2) An analysis of what is made possible and what is constrained by the specific frameworks at use when visual production is at work with and about self-managed groups should provide an insight about the learning experiences in those groups, and about the learning experience of the teams that work on documenting such practices.