From Proletariat to Precariat: An Interactive Documentary Intervention in Northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina

This practice-based PhD interrogates the capacity of interactive documentary as a tool for civic action. More specifically, it looks at interactive documentary as a social practice and form of intervention; a method of building and mobilizing community archives. The central piece of practice associated with this PhD is a web-based interactive documentary titled From Proletariat to Precariat. The project, hereafter Pro2Pre, is a proof of concept and an enactment of the methodological excursions explored in this thesis. Synthesizing viewpoints from several different disciplines, this thesis argues that interactive documentary can be employed and studied as a collective archiving practice, serving the needs of different communities and engaging the historical from below. Furthermore, it proposes a new theoretical framework for interactive documentary as a counter-archive; one that calls attention to different software modalities and foregrounds site-based work and encounters. Finally, due to concerns regarding technological idiosyncrasies and instabilities that threaten to wipe out or turn much of activist media labor into ineligible digital data, this thesis also proposes some strategies for preservation and access.