The Films
The Process
Collaborative Filmmaking as Brokered Dialogue
Northeast Arizona is at the precipice of a helium extraction boom. This ongoing public engagement project, led by graduate research assistant Noa Bruhis, explores differing stakeholder perceptions of helium extraction through the production of short 3-5 minute informational films. These films combine whiteboard illustrations with footage from filmed interviews, field site visits, archival materials, and other sources to interrogate the shared and personal perceptions of helium extraction, how communication within and between groups influences these imaginaries, and how imagery is used to conceptualize, communicate, and mobilize prospective futures. Importantly, the content and narratives of the films will be co-designed with stakeholders from regulatory agencies, industry, and a diverse group of community members in the Holbrook Basin.
Our intervention untangles controversial or difficult to communicate topics discovered in our prior research, such as critical minerals economics and markets; regulatory and permitting processes; land use and mineral rights; technologies of extraction; assessing risks; community responses; and social and environmental justice. For each module, we utilize a process currently being tested with a subset of stakeholders in preliminary research. This process begins by translating the film’s main theme into questions to be answered by the module, developing a loose script to share with participants for feedback, complementing the script with visual materials, then producing the film module based on further negotiation with participants.
About Film as Brokered Dialogue
Our process is inspired by Parsons and Lavery’s (2012) concept of brokered dialogue, in which participatory-edited films serve as co-constructed boundary objects. Brokered dialogue utilizes narrative-based inquiry to encourage collaborative expression, imagination, emotion, and aesthetics, in order to analyze epistemic differences between adverse parties on controversial health and social issues. Film is a familiar and accessible form of knowledge transfer and social intervention, as well as a powerful data collection tool in the field of visual sociology, visual ethnography, and media design. Film outputs also have the potential to engage wide audiences and heighten awareness on environmental topics, as evidenced in several examples related to oil and gas extraction. We contend that brokered dialogue, through collaborative filmmaking, is ideally suited to probing for the sociotechnical imaginaries of helium extraction at a personal and cultural level.
Below is a diagram of how our brokered dialogue filmmaking process works.
