The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

(counterpublics) - such is the way of grassroots documentary d/e practices - leads to
another compound, “counter-hegemony.” Ellie Rennie, in her book, Community Media:
A Global Introduction, introduces the term:
Radical media is better understood via theories of counterhegemony
(disruptions to dominant power) and counter-public spheres (a term to
describe the myriad and diverse spaces where discussion and dissent
occur) as well as new social movement theory, rather than as simply
oppositional. (2006, p.19)
Rennie has addressed a method to resist hegemony by recognizing alternative media’s
ability to flourish in society’s spaces that are (re)claimed on an ongoing basis by a myriad
of media groups and projects, including those that seek to challenge power imbalances
through grassroots distribution and exhibition of documentary cinema. These practices
and spaces run “counter” to those of dominant, or hegemonic, media and cinema currents
described earlier in this chapter, and ultimately serve to challenge, dislodge and
redistribute power. Of necessity, these challenges happen away from sites of hegemony
(such as the megaplex) and in community-oriented sites (such as schools, homes, cafés,
parks) where power is more easily negotiated/shared among various members of the
community. Nancy Fraser writes: “If power is instantiated in mundane social practices
and relations, then efforts to dismantle or transform the regime must address those
practices and relations.” (1981, p. 280)
Jürgen Habermas’s seminal work, The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere (1962) is crucial to any discussion of publics and counterpublics; it is arguably
“indispensable to critical social theory and to democratic political practice.” (Fraser,
1992, p.3) Habermas’s notion of the public sphere is, of course, highly problematic and
with its own historically confined set of limitations, but it is also, as Fraser has noted,
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