Visions of Wallingford: Neighborhood Learning through Collaborative Filmmaking

Abstract

Addressing the planet’s most urgent socio-ecological challenges requires coordination across individuals, institutions, the built environment, and the natural world. This kind of coordination is complex and involves learning at different scales of practice. This dissertation seeks to better understand learning at the scale of the neighborhood, through a collaborative filmmaking project. Residents of a predominantly white, densifying Seattle neighborhood led a series of local walking tours, filmed these tours, and assembled the footage into a documentary film. By theorizing civic learning as a semiotic process, I examine how discourses related to neighborhood and community life inform participants’ modes of expression; and how these modes of expression are laminated into modes of relation over the course of the study. Findings show that discourses of care, accessibility, and groundedness emerge and transform through participants’ ongoing place-storying and infrastructuring efforts. From this analysis, I suggest implications for planners, education researchers, and others interested in creating civic media and designing civic learning environments. This dissertation includes two additional components: a film, archived at https://hdl.handle.net/1773/52199, and a website, archived at https://wayback.archive-it.org/4366/20240816143217/https://sites.google.com/view/neighborhoodlearning/home/.