Introduction to the Thematic Section on Participatory Filmmaking of Replika, a Hungarian Social Science Journa

In the introduction I overview some definitions, that have, among others, the shared element of collective knowledge production through video media by disadvantaged communities and their allies. Then I refer to some preliminaries from the terrain of visual anthropology and activist documentary, and to some representative examples from the history of participatory video applied in developmental fields. Similarly, I refer to some decisive literature in the subject, and to the disciplines involved, which are numerous. Talking about the scholarly literature of participatory video, I put an emphasis on the works the authors of which make an effort to sum up the actual state of the subject, in order to help the communication between various research fields, and to make it easy for the experts to have an overall view on the method. After a short description of the network of visual-performative methods I introduce the work of the Minor Media/Culture Research Centre at the Department of Media and Communication (ELTE University, Budapest, Hungary), with special regard to its participatory video projects. Finally, I shortly sum up the content of the articles published in the section. There are two translations in the section, and five original articles, written by Hungarian authors. The former ones served as inspirations for the Minor Media/Culture Research Centre, particularly social anthropologist Michael Stewart’s article about the MyStreet-project, and its historical source, the Mass Observation movement. The original Hungarian papers are unique in their nature, as far as there has been no overall study until now about the catalyst method (improved by Sári Haragonics, the well-known expert of the Hungarian participatory video activism), the MyStreet movement in Hungary (Balázs Cseke), the participatory video as applied in museum pedagogy (Krisztina Varga), the You-Too method applied in university groups (György Ligeti), and the history of participatory video and its current Hungarian „minor media”-examples (András Müllner).