Filming with Rural Women in Transcarpathia: Notes on Positionality and Co-Production

Author Ágnes Erőss This paper aims to discuss the potential emancipatory power or capacity of participation in an audiovisual research project, while reflecting on the limits of co-production. It builds on and develops themes from longitudinal qualitative fieldwork (semi-structured interviews, field observation, and videography) conducted since 2017 in a village of about 300 residents in Transcarpathia, Western Ukraine, with its Hungarian minority community. The research analyzes the rigidity of gender roles in the peripheral settings of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). In CEE, socialism produced a ‘failed emancipation’ of women who, after 1990, ended up in more precarious social positions, especially in rural peripheries, typically performing informal and underpaid jobs. Following 1990, migration became a natural strategy for individual and family sustenance, resulting in gender and age imbalances, especially in rural peripheries. With the ongoing war in Ukraine, families have separated: men liable for military service leave