Representing community mobilisation on film: learning through and about movements and their struggles

Abstract

This article offers a brief critical overview of some the challenges associated with media representations of community-based protest and social movements. It is followed by a discussion of three Irish documentary films - The Pipe, Meeting Room and The 4th Act - that have profiled community struggles in Dublin and Mayo. The article proposes that, taken together, the films are problem-posing texts, of potential relevance to any readers seeking to learn with and through the praxis of community development and social movements. Generative themes raised by the films include: the hegemony of particular conceptions of development and solidarity and the denigration of alternatives; the repressive character and responses of the state when faced with dissent; and the meaningfulness of and constraints on the tactics ‘chosen’ by oppressed and peripheralised communities.