Women of the Sun: Mediating Co-Production in Iranian Agrarian Systems

This dissertation examines co-production through participatory video methods and its implications for socioecological research and action. It specifically focuses on the role of a longitudinal participatory video process in mediating and mobilizing local cultural and ecological knowledge and practices and informing how vulnerable communities are impacted by and respond to environmental change. I use a case study of a participatory video project that took place in an agrarian district in Kerman, Iran to understand how a group of women applied participatory video methods to reflexively represent and reconfigure locally shared narratives and values that affect rural women’s labor, autonomy, and water governing practices. This research provides important ethnographic insights about the mechanisms participatory video draws upon to catalyze collective action and highlights some of the contradictions and complexities of participatory methods in applied visual and environmental anthropology.