Using Cellphilming to Explore Girls’ Agency in Context: A Perspective from Rural South Africa

Drawing on our recent work with a group of 15 girls and young women in a rural community in South Africa, in this chapter we analyze two cellphilms to illustrate how, in and through their girl-authored narratives, our co-researcher participants challenge the enduring, colonialist, narrative about the girl in the Global South as the girl-in-crisis. Through their cellphilm narratives, they identify multiple intersecting constraints on their agency in their context. However, they also speak back to and challenge those constraints, and, by so doing, exercise their agency in context. Informed by a conceptualization of agency as a distributed phenomenon and the notion of a continuum of resistance, our analysis demonstrates how cellphilms can be tools for resistance and for understanding girls’ agency in context.