Agroenvironmental narratives of transformative resistance: How participatory videos frame climate change in India

Abstract

There is urgent need to consider prevailing environmental problems within the larger cultural contexts to effectively progress towards climate change impact reduction. However, national agenda to mollify the climate change rarely frames the crises from the diverse perspectives and experiences that India is home to. Shifting attention from the United Nations’ focus on perpetrators of climate change to climate change victims, this qualitative content analysis uses a constructivist paradigmatic approach to examine the participatory video narratives produced by local media producers in rural India. Based on the levels of analyses for the impact, findings from twenty primary issue videos are thematically presented: individual, family and community, and spatial. The videos depict an intertwined nature of agriculture and environment, and documents agentative social action, transformative collective potential, and present a starting point to catalyse an iterative process of communication that expands our understanding of climate change impact beyond what is portrayed in globally dominant narratives.