“We need to do public health differently in this community”: A reflexive analysis of participatory video, affective relations, and the policy process

abstract This reflexive analysis explores feelings evoked at a participatory video screening intended to provoke policy dialogue around the health and wellbeing of Indigenous youth. The Taking Action! Project engaged Indigenous youth, as health promotion activists, in participatory filmmaking to address HIV in their communities. The filmmakers employed creative strategies of ‘speaking back’ to policymakers and the policy processes from which they are typically excluded. I explore the role of affective learning in participatory visual research, and its impact in the policy process. A feminist approach to affect theory is vital to this work concerned with women and girls’ emotional lives and labours. For instance, it may reveal how Indigenous youth and non-Indigenous policymakers may have similar feelings about colonial legacies but may have very different relationships to those feelings. Regarding settler-Indigenous contexts globally, I argue that policy processes require affective attunement to colonial legacies, and to the ways in which policies affect Indigenous peoples’ everyday lives. This can have unexpected outcomes, such as revealing what Sarah Ahmed calls “the secret places of pain”. Painful feelings matter: they both fuel and frustrate action. Participatory visual methods can build bridges for difficult feelings, creating the grounds for both flourishing and friction.