Replaying Our Process: Video/Art Making and Research (original) (raw)
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This paper contributes to the body of work within the social studies of childhood on creative visual methods and the emerging critique on the participatory assumptions of child-centred creative visual methodology. Drawing on ethnographically informed research with a group of children aged 8–12 years which utilised a range of creative methods including child-led video and photography, the paper provides a methodological focus on the children’s interactions with the adult research team, each other and with the children whom they filmed, interviewed and photographed. The paper suggests that attention to the dynamics between children as researchers and participants is essential for understanding how children’s voices are made (and diminished) in child-led creative visual methods. Methodological attention to the ways in which children’s voices are differently (and unequally) heard in the research encounter is essential for evaluatingwhat such methods bring to research with children and challenges theorisations of a singular children’s voice suggested in the literature.
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Participatory Research and Visual Methods Editorial
This special issue seeks to examine the role of participation in visual methodologies. It is a collection of essays from members of the Visual Scholarship Initiative at Emory University in which practitioners reflect upon their uses of photography, film, and video as a form of practice-based research. Though the use of visual methods and technologies are integral to all of the projects here, our focus is in the range of participation between photographer, filmmaker, or curator and subject or audience and how this impacts what we understand as scholarship. The photograph, film, or video, then, is a means by which we enter into the social and cultural negotiations of and reflections upon meaning making. In this introduction, we attempt to clarify what we mean by participatory research. Such practices often result in crossing disciplinary boundaries, as we discuss below. Further, morphing the use of visual media into a category of research method that generates scholarship with others means we are also exploring various connections and intersections between public scholarship and socially engaged art. Instead of resolving or precisely pinning down the concept of participatory research, we intend to explore the ways participation can be activated by artistic research and visual methods and the various types of relationships that emerge within this process.
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European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 2015
The growing interest in researching and documenting young children’s perspectives and experiences, has led to an increasing use of visual methods, such as photograps and videos. Studies to date, however, have seen artifacts as neutral tools, and have not revealed the differences between the functions of visual artifacts in the research process, and their functions in children’s lives more broadly. In view of this, we scrutinize the function of visual artifacts, using Wenger’s notion of reification, Vygotsky’s idea of mediation, and Wartofsky’s historical epistemology. We enliven the theoretical discussion by featuring illustrative vignettes from our previous study conducted at a Finnish preschool. We then discuss the consequences of our analysis in terms of documentation, and joint reflections that capture and construct the children’s experiences. A number of educational implications are highlighted.