The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

move outwards from the primary concern of aesthetics of fictional cinema, and also
within media studies, where documentary television has become the subject of
sociological as well as critical analysis.” (Ibid) However, despite this new space for
documentary discussion that they rightfully identify as witnessed by the numerous books,
journals, articles and conferences that now proliferate, there are spaces that remain
neglected by the academy and its various articulations of knowledge production and
transfer. Grassroots d/e spaces and practices deserve academic inclusion in the
documentary discussion, and to do so, other, less-obvious areas need to be explored. The
authors that follow examine a diverse range of areas including hegemony, counterpublics,
democratic theory and alternative media. Their interrogations, isolated, may seem
unconcerned with documentary d/e issues, but together the ideas they wrestle with and
the authors’ approaches to divergent academic areas form the edges of the map I use to
discuss documentary d/e spaces and practices as important sites in the larger territory of
academic studies into documentary and (media) democracy.
A central starting point to provide a kind of ‘theoretical net’ to gather the various
formations is Raymond Williams’s concept of “structure of feeling,” where residual
effects of cultural activities are shaped into new cultural forms that make sense of a
material world (Williams, 1977). There is not one structure of feeling to be concerned
with regarding this investigation into grassroots documentary distribution and exhibition
practices in Canada, but several. It is the tools that Williams’s conceptual framework of
structure of feeling brings to developing a coherent methodology that I engage with.
Williams’s critique of individual experience seeks to move away from analysis
and discussion that relies on the reification of culture into commodities and numbers. He
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