In Their Own Image: Voluntary Filmmaking at a Non-Profit Community Media Organisation

Kirklees Local TV is a non-profit social enterprise based in the town of Huddersfield (West Yorkshire, UK) that has been creating news programmes and documentary films about the Kirklees area since March 2011. As a participatory researcher, I spent twenty months as a contributing member of KLTV between January 2018 and September 2019, keeping a field diary of my experiences. In parallel, I conducted several qualitative interviews with regular contributors at the organisation as a means of collaboratively exploring this project’s primary research question: why do people volunteer at an organisation like KLTV?

This thesis adopts Facet Methodology (Mason 2011) and the Generic Inductive Qualitative Model (Maxwell 2005; Hood 2007) as central pillars of its research design. I was persuaded by the inventiveness of Facet Methodology to create a docuseries of my own – four short research films (Appendices E1-E4) that represent different ways of looking at KLTV. By linking this arts-based research data to pertinent literature in the fields of Cultural Literacy, Critical Race Theory and Communities of Practice, this thesis posits Kirklees Local TV as a site of social, cultural, and digital learning for citizens of practically all ages.

Perhaps the most insightful connection drawn between this research and the wider world is with the work of Barry Barclay: a Māori (Indigenous New Zealand) filmmaker who believed ‘every culture has a right and a responsibility to present its own culture to its own people’ (2015, 7). Barclay’s autobiography, Our Own Image: A Story of a Māori Filmmaker (2015), provides a series of illuminating analogies and metaphors about the Fourth (Indigenous) Cinema movement that, when extrapolated to the context of minority culture filmmaking in the UK, shed further light on why Kirklees’ citizens choose to pick up the camera and hold it up to the world around them.