Jean Mitchell

Tracking Modernities: Video Technology and The Vanuatu Young People’s Project (2009)

Independent since 1980, Vanuatu, like many postcolonial nations, is unable to meet the rising demand for formal education from its rapidly growing population of young people. In this paper I analyze how video technology and school drop-outs intersect in an urban project in Vanuatu, an archipelago in the southwest Pacific. Many young people living in marginalized urban settlements are disenchanted with the failed promises of development, particularly in the area of education that is characterized by high drop-out rates and low levels of literacy. Access to video production has provided some school-leavers and drop-outs opportunities to challenge the cultural and social constraints that limit their articulation in the public arena where discourse is dominated by elders and Melanesian big men. By tracking the ways in which video production has offered some young people new discursive possibilities, this paper explores how technology allows youth to mount a critique of modernity including ideas of what counts as literacy, education and authority in newly configured public spaces.

Jean Mitchell has a M.A. in International Development and a M.A. and PhD in Social Anthropology, and has lived, worked and conducted research for extended periods of time in India, Indonesia, and in the South Pacific nations of Kiribati, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. In India and Solomon Islands she worked for the United Nations while in Kiribati she researched gender and fisheries as part of a collaborative study with government officials. In Vanuatu she undertook extended fieldwork in an urban settlement culminating in the creation of the Vanuatu Young People’s Project at the Vanuatu Cultural centre. In this ongoing project young people are trained in research, advocacy and video production. Innovative ethnography that privileges collaborative approaches promotes indigenous researchers and foregrounds the perspectives of gender and youth have been central to my academic work. She recently completed a SSHRC-funded project entitled “Working Flash, Youth, Labour and Mobility in Vanuatu.”