Women’s audiovisual training in the Global South is a critical site for examining how colonial and gender hierarchies shape access to learning, the circulation of knowledge, and the visibility of cultural production. DEPWAT focused on audiovisual initiatives in Mexico, Guatemala, and Ecuador to explore how these hierarchies take form in practices of learning and transmission. In doing so, the project addressed a gap in existing research, which has paid greater attention to representation, authorship, and labour insertion than to training as a constitutive dimension of inequality.
The project also examined how pedagogical models, institutional arrangements, and regimes of knowledge shape who can enter audiovisual practice, under what conditions, and with what possibilities of continuity and recognition. To address these questions, DEPWAT developed a collaborative qualitative methodology through workshops and epistemic assemblies across the three country contexts. These formats created spaces for situated exchange, plurality, and negotiation, allowing the project to engage women’s audiovisual experiences without reducing heterogeneous trajectories to a single interpretive frame.
Within this context, DEPWAT pursued four main objectives: to identify the factors that hinder women’s access to audiovisual training; to engage training experiences through collaborative qualitative research; to advance reflection on decolonial pedagogical approaches in audiovisual contexts; and to sustain a platform for dissemination, exchange, and intercultural learning. In this way, the project examined women’s audiovisual training as a site where inequality is organised, while also exploring how decolonial pedagogy may open other forms of learning and inquiry. The project is grounded in Social Sciences and Humanities, particularly philosophy, feminist and decolonial theory, media studies, and education, which shape its conceptual framework, methodological design, and pedagogical reflection.
