The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

screenings can provide opportunity for workshops, discussions, debates, and catalytic
props for effecting policy. 9
Theorizing alternative media practices and radical democracy is at the forefront of
contemporary communications work, and lifts the veil of past work that has failed to
cajole such media out of the margins and into the foreground. There is excellent
academic work that analyses the corporate media cartels 10 , (McChesney, 1999;
Bagdikian, 1987, 2004; McDonald and Wasko, 2007) just as there are ample published
texts extolling the virtues of alternative media as oppositional efforts against said cartels.
(Downing, 2000; Couldry and Curran, 2003; Langlois and Dubois, 2005; Skinner, 2006)
Alternative media spaces that are described exclusively as oppositional constitute what
Nancy Fraser calls “weak publics,” where “deliberative practice consists exclusively in
opinion formation and does not also encompass decision making.” (1993, p.24) Mouffe,
Rodriguez and others provide a new and exciting direction for conceptualizing alternative
media spaces and practices, one that tends to lift the murky residue of essentialism and
instead complicates, invigorates, and legitimates these phenomena as counterpublics that
build democracies.
Community-oriented documentary distribution and exhibition sites and practices
do not fit neatly into one envelope labeled “oppositional,” but many represent real actions
against hegemony, and in this sense they can be viewed as “confrontational,” a tendency
that Mouffe believes to be a vital ingredient to democracy. She writes:
9 Witness is a non-profit organization dedicated to using video practices to expose human rights
violations and instigate change. The institute was the first instalment by the organization, and was
held in the summer of 2007 with over 40 activists attending workshops and other events from
around the world. (Source: email from Liz Miller, advisor to the VAI)
10 Evidence of this is found in Derek Hrynyshyn’s Review Essay for the Canadian Journal of
Communication, entitled, “The Mainstreaming of Media Crtique,” Vol.30, No.4, 2005.
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