Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries and Extending Participation through Film and Applied Theatre Techniques: Reflecting on the Umzi ka Mama Oral Histories Project

Abstract

Scholarship on African women has progressed from mainly focusing on royal women, political struggle heroines, and activists to include more stories of domestic workers, farmers, mothers, and daughters. Over time, feminist oral historians gradually moved from research with rigid traditional approaches to update their approaches to include creative methodologies that can enhance and extend interlocutor participation. Through a feminist lens, the paper articulates how a creative and alternative methodology extended interlocutor participation in the Umzi ka mama oral history project. The project explored unreported stories of seven African women who have owned family property in Fingo Village, Makhanda since pre-1994. The article explores how a multidisciplinary methodology spanning over three disciplines, history, drama and film, helped gather data using interviews, video, forum, play-back and image theatre inspired techniques. The results revealed how extended participation beyond oral history interviews presented more opportunities for shared authority and negotiations throughout the process. Additionally, the results show how accessible dissemination can be achieved. Although history, film and drama methods pair well together as cross-cutting approaches, there are disciplinary tensions that are embedded in multidisciplinary studies. The paper highlights these tensions to show why negotiation is a necessary part of multidisciplinary research.