Ways of Seeing

An Indigenous Media Archive

What Is Ways of Seeing?

Ways of Seeing attempts to bring together projects and conversations around Community Media practices and Indigenous media that are in opposition to conventional media forms. The archive compiles resources addressing Community Media in general, and Indigenous media in particular, through self-reflexive production approaches — documenting media that reflects community perspectives rather than the filmmaker’s viewpoint.

This project is imagined and curated as a subset of the larger pedagogical conversation around Critical Media Literacy, inspired by the interventions of educationists and cultural theorists Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share (2019). It tries to critically analyze self-representation as a mode of media production and bring those works together on one platform. In the Indian context, projects like Ek Tara Collective and the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) are instrumental in locating the archiving practices and visual representations of Adivasi communities — work that lets Ways of Seeing expand a discursive space and ask whether media is simply a medium to archive culture, or whether culture itself is defined by the triad of ‘media–art–praxis.’

By examining the discourse that shapes distribution, reception, and—most importantly—production, this archive acts as a resource on the intersection of local cultures with the regional histories of media production, grounded in analyzing how ‘technologies of power’ (Ginsburg, 1994) are contested by new technologies of social hierarchy. In organizing these resources, the project challenges the idea of media as a neutral site of production and of Indigenous people as exotic objects — curating conversations and platforms that let Indigenous people self-create their images and determine how they want to be represented.

Neither this platform nor this idea is novel: it draws on and builds upon existing Community Media archives worldwide, questioning the ideological presence of dominant narratives and bringing forward voices from marginalized spaces. It argues for imagining archives as a place for dialogue and production, not just preservation. Archivist and scholar Michelle Caswell (2016) writes about “the absence, under-representation, maligning and trivialization” of marginalized voices and their impact on meta-historical narratives; Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd (2009) argue that community archives counter existing stereotypes and misrepresentations by mainstream media and popular culture; and Faye Ginsburg (1991) advocates viewing Indigenous media as expressing political and creative perspectives from historically marginalized subject positions.

Positionality

This platform cannot be detached from my position as an India- and Delhi-based, urban-educated, cisgender man doing doctoral research at a globally recognized university at the heart of the Global West. My academic training in Development Studies and Development Practice shaped my awareness of discrimination, marginalization, and well-being alongside the power dynamics of everyday life.

My background includes collaborative work on culturally sensitive films across Eastern India’s Indigenous regions, including language study among the communities involved. Over seven years, I have engaged in scholarly and community-based artistic projects examining alternative development practices and possibilities of creative expression — examining questions of media, authorship, and knowledge production.

Being an outsider in Indigenous spaces means constantly negotiating privileges and their dismounting, and the tension between maintaining intellectual distance and avoiding romanticization. I frame this positionality as both an ethical and an intellectual responsibility: to represent diverse voices authentically, and to resist and counter the dominant and exploitative narratives directed at Indigenous communities.