An Interactive Framework: Understanding Community Desires Through Participatory Video

Traditional research methods often fall short in understanding marginalized communities due to cultural and contextual differences. This study explores the application of participatory video (PV) in a humanitarian engineering context, focusing on Ukrainian refugees in the Netherlands, and its impact on enhancing social justice within community-led projects. PV is an approach that amplifies marginalized community voices by enabling them to record and share their own stories, contributing to the design of effective solutions and the promotion of social justice. The assessment of the constructed framework showed encouraging outcomes regarding its perceived usability. However, the actual implementation of the framework did not meet expectations. It is crucial to prioritize consistent group-support sessions for video creation, fostering participant motivation, and nurturing trust between the researcher and the participants. Yet, PV emerges as a powerful tool for humanitarian engineering to uncover hidden voices and understand hidden layers of community life.