Dr Danai Mikelli

This paper provides an exploration of the creative and ethical challenges that emerged from producing a 360-degree documentary demo, focusing on two Greek drag artists who live in Athens. It introduces a new approach to understanding empathy at the level of practice and from the perspective of audiences, combining the production of the demo with a reflexive analysis of audience responses to the demo. Emphasis is placed on the potential of 360-degree documentary to develop emotional and cognitive empathy. The demo aimed to capture the drag artists’ performance as a form of resistance, using an innovative technology to portray this under-represented community. A reflexive methodology was deployed for analysing the data, which were collected in the form of 360-degree video and focus groups with participants experiencing the demo. The findings of this study provide insights into the possibility of 360-degree documentary to create change. During the production of the demo, moments of perspective-taking between the researcher and the documentary subjects were rare. The focus groups pointed to aspects which also hindered the empathic potential of the demo, including the diverging expectations of participants and the levels of participants’ familiarity with this technology.

The Glowing Divide (2015) is an interactive documentary exploring the topic of social isolation in young people. Created by a group of young adults at Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol, the project follows three teenagers with the aim to change perceptions of social isolation. This interactive documentary was used as a resource in a Critical Media Literacy intervention which deployed the methodology of Participatory Action Research and took place in Coventry in partnership with the creative production company Imagineer. Based on the outcomes of this research, I argue towards a Pedagogy of Difference 2.0, which is a new and more nuanced approach to teaching and learning with interactive media in complex environments. This innovative pedagogy embraces the limitations of interactivity on young people’s media production and does not take young people’s familiarity with technology for granted. In this regard, Pedagogy of Difference 2.0 acknowledges the contextual nature of teaching and learning, moving beyond the often abstract discourse of Critical Pedagogy.

This paper presents the findings of VR Kaleidoscope, a community-based educational project involving young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in the creation of 360-degree films for Virtual Reality (VR). The project aimed to provide the participants with the tools to offer insights into their worlds, by enabling them to produce immersive films. The research around the project resulted in empirical evidence, through qualitative interviews and VR projects, of the potential impact of VR in Critical Media Literacy settings. This approach aims at encouraging ‘marginalised or misrepresented people' to tell stories that ‘express their concerns' (Kellner and Share [2007]. ‘Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education’. In Media Literacy: A Reader, edited by D. Macedo, and S. R. Steinberg, 3-23. New York: Peter Lang Publishing). VR lends itself for thinking about, and representing, ‘space' and ‘place' in new ways, due to its immersive potential. The young people were provided with VR training in order to create their own 360-degree films responding to the theme ‘What does place mean to you?’. The project sheds light on the technological, relational and experiential aspects of VR practice and aspires to prompt media educators, filmmakers and community groups to collaborate using VR.