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Voicing ordinary people and everyday narratives through participatory cinema

This practice-led participatory study seeks to probe the extent to which ordinary people, in their everyday spaces, and whose voices are absent or co-opted in ‘traditional’ cinema, can actively participate in narrating their stories through short films. The project, titled Utaifa, entailed working with a focus group of eleven members of the Abakuria community in Kenya, over eight days, to prod-use three shorts. It relies of Homi Bhabha’s cultural difference ideas, Nico Carpentier’s maximalist media participation theory and conceptual discourses on self-representations. The article has three broad sections. The first offers insight into the Utaifa participants discussing their three shorts. The second unpacks the study’s rationale discussing opportunities presented by access to digital platforms, gender dynamics in marginalized communities, dominance by media elites in representations, ubiquity of grand narratives at the expense of self-representations and the language question. The third section delves into the study’s important insights and lessons.