Engaging Girls with Disabilities through Cellphilming: Reflections on Participatory Visual Research as a Means of Countering Violence in the Global South

Nguyen, Gonick and Bui ask a methodological question with a political consequence: who gets to make the account of disabled girls’ lives? Their 2021 article does not treat phone video as a technical fix for exclusion. It follows a project in which girls make short films in small groups, with women with disabilities and local disability organizations helping shape the process. The point is not simply that participants appear on screen; they choose scenes, images and endings through which everyday power becomes visible.

The research took place in three Vietnamese communities—urban areas in Hanoi and Can Tho, and A Luoi in Hue—and involved 86 disabled participants, including 55 girls and 31 women. The girls were recruited in relation to discrimination and barriers in education and community life. They worked in groups of four or five, making storyboards and short videos on mobile phones. Women with disabilities helped facilitate the work, and local organizations contributed to adapting questions and activities to context. That design matters: film-making was one part of a wider process of discussion and organizing, not a device handed over in isolation.

The authors interpret scenes in which a girl with a visual impairment refuses to engage with a bully until he apologizes, and another film where an ethnic minority girl is denied the right to speak in class, assigned cleaning work and threatened when she refuses to serve her peers. These are not presented as generic illustrations of “vulnerability.” The films make school authority, peer hierarchy, ethnic difference and ableism legible through the girls’ chosen sequences. The final gesture of refusal in the second film changes the scene’s grammar: the girl is not only shown suffering exclusion but acting within it.

This is where the paper deepens disability justice. “Voice” is not something a researcher bestows, and participation does not make a project automatically equal. The authors acknowledge their own power as adults and researchers, and warn against romanticizing the relationship between participants and academic institutions. A phone camera can create another route for meaning-making, including for participants whose stories may not fit interview language; it cannot by itself remove barriers, guarantee accessibility or decide who controls the final interpretation.

The study is bounded by its three sites and by recruitment through disability organizations; girls who were not connected to those organizations may not have had the same access. Its findings do not represent every disabled girl in Vietnam, much less the Global South. Read it beside “Ten Principles of Disability Justice” to move from movement commitments to a situated research practice, then compare the study of reproductive autonomy in Zimbabwe and the policy brief on collective rights work in Sri Lanka. These are editorial connections, not a shared dataset. See the publisher’s article for the study and its methods.