Interrogating the conventional boundaries of research methods in social sciences: The role of visual representation in ethnography (original) (raw)
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Artistry in Social Science Research
This interpretive research study is an inquiry into social science researchers’ aesthetic practices in relation with photographic-based research practices. Specifically, it is an hermeneutic study that probes their experiences of practice careers and trajectories of practitioners in relation to expectations, traditions, and conventions of visual research communities. I explore through my conversations with five visual researchers from diverse social science disciplines the relevancy of aesthetics in evolving photographic research practices guided by philosophical hermeneutics and practice theory. Participants demonstrate that photographic-based research practices are messy, interdisciplinary, and complex because of the shared, entwined histories of photography, disciplinary traditions, and emerging aesthetic practices. The inquiry explores changing practices over time and space, creating a possible trajectory of aesthetic practice in photographic-based research practices. This trajectory is based on participants’ recollections of practice careers and literature about photography’s emergence into multiple histories across disciplines and fields and its ultimate establishment as a legitimate social science approach to data collection, analysis, and dissemination. It probes participants’ expectations, traditions, desires, and values of photographic-based research practices and relationships with aesthetic practices as their visual research careers evolved over time and space. Visual researchers face increasing complexity and challenges in their individual practices because of evolving shared practices. This includes their place(s) within visual research and disciplinary communities, borrowing from other disciplines, challenges to traditional expectations of collective practices, and their own desires to innovate and contribute to visual research methods. Aesthetic practices further complicate both individual and community practices, as aesthetics is still viewed by some practitioners as the domain of the arts and irrelevant to social science while others explore social worlds with aesthetic experience and expressions.
Editorial: Rethinking research with methodologies of art practice
Technoetic Arts, 2024
This issue of Technoetic Arts encompasses eight articles by artists and scholars from around the globe who engage with methodologies of art practice within research that reflects on technological and ecological change, contributing to the discourse on the inclusion of subjective experience in research. The articles by authors Dulmini Perera, Kate Doyle, Nora S. Vaage, Merete Lie, Nikita Peresin Meden, Kristina Pranjić, Peter Purg, Nicolaas H. Jacobs, Marth Munro, Chris Broodryk, Semi Ryu, Rahul Mahata, Doreswamy, Sana Altaf and Aqib Javid Parry form a collection that crosses disciplines and genres to engage in fundamental critique of existing modes of enquiry and conclusion. The texts situate art and design methodologies in particular cultural contexts and in relation to frameworks defined by research methodologies of the sciences and humanities to gain agency for critique and to counter a sense of inevitability that has come to mark the most recent crises.
Baldwin, L. (2021) Presence, Voice and Reflexivity in Feminist and Creative Research: A personal and professional reflection. In: Masson, I., Baldwin, L. and Booth, N. (Eds.) Critical Reflections from the Women, Families, Crime and Justice Research Network, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 173-198, 2021
Feminist research seeks to authenticate, substantiate and illuminate women's thoughts, feelings and experiences (Oakley, 2016; Renzetti, 2013; Maynard and Purvis, 1994). Trusting the memories, accounts and assimilated experiences of participants, and their authentic reproduction is an essential aspect to feminist research principles, whether those memories and experiences are recent or distant. This is particularly important concerning a population who are so often mistrusted, silenced, unheard or muted, i.e. prisoners, criminalised women, and children (Baldwin in Lockwood, forthcoming, Bozkurt and Aresti 2019, O'Malley 2018, Wahidin 2004). Aresti et al (2016), argue that lack of visibility and voice in academic criminological research results in prisoners and criminalised individuals often being excluded from the processes of research, furthermore, often being entirely invisible in the products of research, (i.e. research reports, theses, dissertations). Feminist researchers Oakley (1981, 2016), Finch (1984), and Maynard and Purvis (1994) highlight the importance of increased and evidenced reflexivity, alongside a minimisation of power imbalance. Which, they argue can be achieved at least in part, by not viewing research participants as simply being done to as opposed to researched with. Thus, in feminist research, reflexivity is essential, as are the presence and voices of research participants as evident in the process and products of research. This chapter explored the research dynamic between researcher and researched in feminist studies, highlighting and arguing for greater involvement of participants in research, and more creative means of generating knowledge and understanding. The chapter has a global reach in terms of its application. It will identify examples of particularly interactive and creative research and conclude with recommendations for good practice internationally.
Visual Methodology and Ethnographic Un/Knowing
AARE 2008 Conference Papers Collection …, 2008
Current research directions in education and the social sciences have led researchers to focus almost entirely on research outcomes and implications for policy and practice. A focus on the end product of research over data generation interactions and interventions occlude full consideration of knowledge generation processes in the research. In this paper we delineate the pedagogic dynamics of image production in a research project involving refugee young people in Brisbane, Australia. The Narrating our World (NOW) project drew our attention to the theoretical lacuna and restricted understanding of the opportunities and limits afforded by visual research, and to the need to theorise approaches that do not fetishise images or research outcomes as objective commodities independent of people, contexts and political agendas. In examining the interface of data generation and interpretation beyond that of methodological discussions about objectivity and subjectivity we reflect on our project as an 'activist ethnography' (Luttrell, 2003: 147). Activist ethnography addresses the concepts of remembering, ambivalence and related epistemological tensions, and is informed by postcolonial theory. It acknowledges the changing dynamics of the research encounter in relation to how we see and represent others. From this perspective activist ethnography is not simply about reporting findings as if they relate directly and simply to a 'real world'. Rather in conceptualising research as an engaged and tentative practice of knowledge making and unmaking, it remains open to articulating possibilities for new imaginings and 'what's never been' (Monk Kidd, 2002: 120-121). SIN08262 SINGH, MATTHEWS: Visual Methodology and Ethnographic Un/knowing.
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.
In recent years, following the example of anthropological and sociological studies, the use of visual methods for the observation and production of insights has become increasingly important in many other disciplines of social research, such as social work, social policy, health sector and education. But why can visual methods of representation be so useful in social research? This article provides an overview of the historical evolution of the visual anthropological discipline, and of the debate about the relationship between art practice and ethnographic research. It focuses on the role of art as a means of communication and, in particular, as a way of expressing inner feelings, emotions, and all those inexplicable states of mind known in philosophy as ‘qualia’. The theory developed by Ricoeur on the application of text-interpretation methodology as a paradigm for interpretation in general in the field of social sciences, is used here to offer a proposal for the implementation of fine art, specifically painting, as a complementary method to express anthropological insights.
Ethnography-based art. Undisciplined dialogues and creative research practices. An Introduction
Visual Ethnography, 2018
This special issue is the result of conversations around ethnography-based artistic practices and art-based research methods, initiated on occasion of a workshop held at the VI Congress of the Portuguese Association of Anthropology (APA) in June 2016. The ambition of the artists, anthropologists, performers, designers and curators gathered there was to explore explicit combinations and convergences between artistic and curatorial practices and ethnographic processes, dissolving boundaries in order to defend a more experimental approach to ethnographic representation, privileging art-based, participatory and collaborative research as methods. This dossier situates itself in the blurred zone between anthropology, visual arts, and the new possibilities for conducting and communicating our research, moving across – and defying - academic borders. Keywords Ethnography-based art, methodology, experimentation, collaborative knowledge, representation.
Sociological Research Online, 2012
This article discusses and exemplifies a more visual and expressive way of constructing and presenting sociological insight. It seeks to articulate the specific demands, traits and potentials of the ‘visual essay’ as a societal and sociological practice and format. In particular it provides some observations, propositions and arguments that may further help to clarify what the visual sociological essay, as an unorthodox scholarly product, might entail and what place it should acquire in broader scholarly discourse. This theoretical discussion is accompanied by excerpts of concrete visual essays of both scholarly and non-scholarly origin. These examples help to show some of the basic strengths of this format which attempts to play out the synergy of the distinct forms of expression that are combined: images, words, layout and design, adding up to a scientifically informed statement.