Jacob Geuder
2026
Order publication from the publisher
Between Streets and Screens offers a comparative ethnography of digital video activism in Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town in the early 2010s. Focusing closely on the practices of filming protests and police violence, the book shows how eyewitnesses and activists navigate the fine line between power and vulnerability when capturing audiovisual testimonies.
Tracing how marginalized voices are amplified and how urban protests are documented in videos from streets to screens, the book argues that digitalizing the right to the city can never be confined to screens alone. Instead, it remains fundamentally intertwined with urban movements that take to the streets. Through detailed analysis of video activist collectives and everyday filmmakers in Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro, the study reveals what happens behind the camera before videos of protests and police violence start circulating online.
Following the entire trajectory—from the moment eyewitnesses and organized collectives record footage, to the production of visibility on social media platforms—the ethnography shows how audiovisual testimonies create new topographies of visibility. These topographies emerge in a digital-urban-nexus, which brings forth an emancipatory potential of bottom-up video making while simultaneously exposing the vulnerability of videographers.
The research is based on a dissertation supervised by Christian Schmid and Sophie Oldfield. Its author, Jacob Geuder, now works in the Responsible City Project at SPUR and the Université de Neuchâtel.
V. Hase & Köhler publishing
336 pages
ISBN 978-3-7758-1437-9