Richard Chalfen; Laura Sherman; Michael Rich (2010). Visual Studies, 25: 3, 201 — 209. doi: 10.1080/1472586X.2010.523271
First the authors examine the concept of ‘voice’ in one
model of participant media research (PMR) giving special
attention to parallel variables of hearing, begging questions
about the ‘listening’ component of any communication
process. Second, they describe the use of a research
programme entitled Video Intervention/Prevention
Assessment (VIA) and a series of ongoing video narrative
projects with chronically ill young people at Children’s
Hospital Boston. Young people were asked to show how
they see their own illness-centred lives by using videocam
technology. Third, ‘visual voices’ as found on the videotape
results are examined through Thompson’s five kinds of
voice used by participants living with spina bifida, cystic
fibrosis and, in one case, obesity. We conclude that
knowledge and anticipation of what we have termed
‘a dedicated audience’ is one of the primary variables
in the elicitation of voice and the overall value of
participant media research.
Describing their approach to research as participant media research, in which participants (patients with chronic illness) record themselves in front of a video camera for several weeks once a day, the authors concluded that the patient narratives reveal the complexity of voice. Further they argued that a "dedicated audience" makes such voice more recognizable through the PMR. Stressing the importance of listeners and viewer in PMR, they argued:
"We conclude that knowledge and anticipation of
what we have termed ‘a dedicated audience’ is one of the
primary variables in the success of participant media
research. We found that patients are especially enthusiastic
about engaging in participatory media research when they
sense a concerned audience awaits their tele-presence.
Participants develop an altruistic spirit and tone based on
knowing that ‘my’ knowledge, often grounded in ‘my’
personal life experience, is important and valuable to others
and to the potential improvement of personal care, medical
treatment and even survival." (p. 209).
** Mitchell (2008) South African Journal of Education Vol 28:365-383
"Getting the picture and changing the picture: visual
methodologies and educational research in South Africa"
She also similarly argued that "Visual images are particularly appropriate to drawing in the participants themselves as central to the interpretive process." (p. 374) because of its enhanced accessibility.
Showing posts with label visual. Show all posts
Showing posts with label visual. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Sunday, May 8, 2011
On not talking to strangers
: Researching micro worlds of girls through visual auto-ethnographic practices. Gerry Bloustien and Sarah Baker. (2003). Social Analysis, 47(3), 64-79.
Bloustien: ten 15 years old girls for three years. video cameras.
Baker: pre-teen aged girls (8-11), mainly still cameras.
In these research project, the cameras offered the girls a "space to play" (p. 69). [They named auto-visual ethnography]
The authors wrote about the role of the cameras:
"For the girls, the cameras became ways of interpreting and redefining their worlds, ways which frequently expressed far more than the girls were capable of saying, for often it was what was not said that was important." (p. 69).
"Clearly, then, the use of the camera as a methodological tool, and more importantly, placed in the hands and under the control of the young participants, deepened and precipitated a number of previously unforeseen dimensions to the research project." (p. 69)
Authors discussed about camera power arguing that "the camera was so successfully and so efficaciously an entry point into the field across different social domains and locales" (p. 70).
1. It allowed the girls to become active participants as they can control over the final product.
2. It provides researchers with positive dimensions of the research: it fosters reciprocity as the participants are exciting about learning new skills. This aspect is considered "ethical" by the researchers because it balances power relationship involved between researchers and participants [Give and take]
Rethinking of power imbalance, the authors wrote:
3. "What was clear, though, was that the cameras did give the young people license to explore these places of play through the 'objectifying' lens, a license which, in turn, helped to blur the more traditional lines between researcher and researched, and offered new insights about the nature of research." (p. 72).
4. The authors argued that "the use of the camera was able to provide the means of giving the participants an authoritative voice" (p. 72). This implies that the use of the camera was not for reflect reality but for "making the process of mutual discovery and creativity of both the researcher and subjects more transparent" (p. 72). The authors rephrased, "the camera offered insights into the 'layering' of ethnography, the different ways understanding and knowledge are negotiated and realized as part of everyday transactions in the world" (p. 72) . [CREATION OF REALITY]
This layering aspect was the focus of their research projects; they also purposefully examined what is not taken. Thus what mattered to these authors is:
"The point, then, is not what is produced with the visual tool, but how the production relates to the position occupied by the producer in the particular field of that production" (p. 76).
Bloustien: ten 15 years old girls for three years. video cameras.
Baker: pre-teen aged girls (8-11), mainly still cameras.
In these research project, the cameras offered the girls a "space to play" (p. 69). [They named auto-visual ethnography]
The authors wrote about the role of the cameras:
"For the girls, the cameras became ways of interpreting and redefining their worlds, ways which frequently expressed far more than the girls were capable of saying, for often it was what was not said that was important." (p. 69).
"Clearly, then, the use of the camera as a methodological tool, and more importantly, placed in the hands and under the control of the young participants, deepened and precipitated a number of previously unforeseen dimensions to the research project." (p. 69)
Authors discussed about camera power arguing that "the camera was so successfully and so efficaciously an entry point into the field across different social domains and locales" (p. 70).
1. It allowed the girls to become active participants as they can control over the final product.
2. It provides researchers with positive dimensions of the research: it fosters reciprocity as the participants are exciting about learning new skills. This aspect is considered "ethical" by the researchers because it balances power relationship involved between researchers and participants [Give and take]
Rethinking of power imbalance, the authors wrote:
3. "What was clear, though, was that the cameras did give the young people license to explore these places of play through the 'objectifying' lens, a license which, in turn, helped to blur the more traditional lines between researcher and researched, and offered new insights about the nature of research." (p. 72).
4. The authors argued that "the use of the camera was able to provide the means of giving the participants an authoritative voice" (p. 72). This implies that the use of the camera was not for reflect reality but for "making the process of mutual discovery and creativity of both the researcher and subjects more transparent" (p. 72). The authors rephrased, "the camera offered insights into the 'layering' of ethnography, the different ways understanding and knowledge are negotiated and realized as part of everyday transactions in the world" (p. 72) . [CREATION OF REALITY]
This layering aspect was the focus of their research projects; they also purposefully examined what is not taken. Thus what mattered to these authors is:
"The point, then, is not what is produced with the visual tool, but how the production relates to the position occupied by the producer in the particular field of that production" (p. 76).
Introduction: Envisioning ethnography
-Exploring the meaning of the visual in research. Gerry Bloustein (2003). Social Analysis, 47(3), 1-7.
Visual images in the forms of photographs, video, film, and new media have become important to ethnographic endeavors and all of the social sciences (She cited from Banks, 2001).
In the use of the camera for recording oneself, Bloustein wrote:
For it the camera seems to objectify, it can also subjectify. The taking and revisiting of a photo or video of oneself become analogous to the way Lacan has described the dream state of "seeing ourselves seeing ourselves" (Lacan 1979: 74, quote in Sanders 1980:1). No wonder the camera and related visual images increasingly find themselves at the heart of ethnographic research. (p. 2)
Introducing Bloustein's and Baker's work with video projects to which girls were invited to record their daily lives to investigate young girls' developing sense of self from their own perspectives and their relations and negotiations with various institutions, Bloustein described:
"Initially, the cameras were conceived of as an innovative solution to the extreme difficulties of entering, or at least having regular and comfortable access to groups that, almost by definition, would be closed to an adult researcher, but quickly, it was realized that the cameras in both projects took on a far more complex role in the research process." (p. 6)
Visual images in the forms of photographs, video, film, and new media have become important to ethnographic endeavors and all of the social sciences (She cited from Banks, 2001).
In the use of the camera for recording oneself, Bloustein wrote:
For it the camera seems to objectify, it can also subjectify. The taking and revisiting of a photo or video of oneself become analogous to the way Lacan has described the dream state of "seeing ourselves seeing ourselves" (Lacan 1979: 74, quote in Sanders 1980:1). No wonder the camera and related visual images increasingly find themselves at the heart of ethnographic research. (p. 2)
Introducing Bloustein's and Baker's work with video projects to which girls were invited to record their daily lives to investigate young girls' developing sense of self from their own perspectives and their relations and negotiations with various institutions, Bloustein described:
"Initially, the cameras were conceived of as an innovative solution to the extreme difficulties of entering, or at least having regular and comfortable access to groups that, almost by definition, would be closed to an adult researcher, but quickly, it was realized that the cameras in both projects took on a far more complex role in the research process." (p. 6)
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Photo-elicitation
Collier, Malcolm. (2007). The applied visual anthropology of John Collier: A photo essay. In Sarah Pink (Ed.), Visual intervention: Applied visual anthropology. New York, NY: Berghahn Books.
In this chapter, the author introduces some works of John Collier Jr, to whom we are indebted for the use of photography in anthropology and sociology research, in particular, photo-elicitation, a method he developed. Looking at the Vicos Project (in the mid-1950s), in which close to nine-thousand still images and hours of 16 mm films were taken in Vicos, Peru, the author wrote:
The visual ethnography was intended to provide both information for immediate use and also a baseline record for later comparative evaluation of the impact of the project. (p. 35)
The author noted that in the late 60s, John Collier turned his attention to cross-cultural schooling and at the same time, started using super 8 film equipment in response to the limitations of still photography. With this respect, the author wrote, "The shift to film placed more emphasis on observation and analysis of social interactions and process through time and space" (p. 44)
[This essay indicates that J. Collier, perhaps many others in that period, regarded visual images as a mirroring representation of the reality like a documentation]
In concluding the use of visual images by J. Collier, the author wrote:
"While in earlier years John Collier Jr's photographs were more classically documentary in character, intended to make statements to viewers for applied purposes (what I understand this term as an exploration of the potential of photos to reveal something that painting cannot do), by the 1960s they became explicitly tools for obtaining information and understanding about the circumstances in which they were made. The camera became a more systematically directed tool for data gathering and less of an expressive device. The resulting images were often less individually compelling but the collective informational content became a far more extensive and complete source of information on the circumstances in front of the lens" (p. 49)
[This indicate that the use of photos was predominantly objectivistic and positivistic. The photos were to provide vivid reality themselves. They were a tool for data gathering.]
In this chapter, the author introduces some works of John Collier Jr, to whom we are indebted for the use of photography in anthropology and sociology research, in particular, photo-elicitation, a method he developed. Looking at the Vicos Project (in the mid-1950s), in which close to nine-thousand still images and hours of 16 mm films were taken in Vicos, Peru, the author wrote:
The visual ethnography was intended to provide both information for immediate use and also a baseline record for later comparative evaluation of the impact of the project. (p. 35)
The author noted that in the late 60s, John Collier turned his attention to cross-cultural schooling and at the same time, started using super 8 film equipment in response to the limitations of still photography. With this respect, the author wrote, "The shift to film placed more emphasis on observation and analysis of social interactions and process through time and space" (p. 44)
[This essay indicates that J. Collier, perhaps many others in that period, regarded visual images as a mirroring representation of the reality like a documentation]
In concluding the use of visual images by J. Collier, the author wrote:
"While in earlier years John Collier Jr's photographs were more classically documentary in character, intended to make statements to viewers for applied purposes (what I understand this term as an exploration of the potential of photos to reveal something that painting cannot do), by the 1960s they became explicitly tools for obtaining information and understanding about the circumstances in which they were made. The camera became a more systematically directed tool for data gathering and less of an expressive device. The resulting images were often less individually compelling but the collective informational content became a far more extensive and complete source of information on the circumstances in front of the lens" (p. 49)
[This indicate that the use of photos was predominantly objectivistic and positivistic. The photos were to provide vivid reality themselves. They were a tool for data gathering.]
Visusal Methods in Social Research
Banks, Marcus. (2001). London, UK: Sage.
Banks introduces ways to incorporate visual images into social science research. According to him, anthropology has been a pioneer of using visual images as a form of visual anthropology. But he noted a growing body of literature on visual research in other disciplines in social science research in 1990s, and yet, methodological insights was confined to specific areas, such as the production of ethnographic films. Thus he presents some alternative methods and some advantages of using visual images. However, this book is heavily focused on photography. Acknowledging this, Banks found an advantage of using still photos for research in its ubiquity in modern society:
Still photography is a medium available to almost everyone in the world as either producer or consumer. and examples form the use of still photography can often serve to points arising from the use of all or most visual media . . . (p. x)
About photo-elicitation:
Banks introduced photo-elicitation. "It involves using photography to invoke comments, memory and discussion in the course of a semi-structure interview" (p. 87). Photos become the basis of discussion and provoking vague memories. Collier and Collier (1986, Visual anthropology: Photography as a research method), who pioneered photo elicitation (using archival photos), pointed out that photos can contribute to lessen awkwardness that interviewees might feel: eliminating direct eye contact and awkward silence. Banks pointed out that photo-elicitation is not straightforward in practice because of issues of photographic multivocality and the complexity of relationship between photo objects and human social relations. In this light, he discussed the use of other types of photos. Further, he argued for the potential of collaborative research through photo-elicitation. He wrote:
"Rather, the introduction of photographs to interviews and conversations sets off a kind of chain reaction: the photographs effectively exercise agency, causing people to do and think things they had forgotten, or to see things they had always known in a new way, . . . (p. 98)
For Banks, the term "method" is inseparable from theory and analysis , and yet, no less important than the others, because it makes social research an "an engagement, not an exercise in data collection" (p. 179) by letting research subjects co-operate with researchers, if not participate, in the research process based on their knowledge of their lives. He implies using visual images can be one of such methods.
The last paragraph well summarizes his view of images in research:
"Images exist materially in the world, are involved in particular and specific huamn social relations. Their meanings are historically and socially embedded, told through their internal and external narratives. They have authors and consumers, they are attributed with agency and affect the agency of others. All these features are discernible, documentable, and can be isolated for analysis and comparison. The practitioners of visual social research who bemoan the lack of attention paid to their labours are, in some ways, missing the point. Visual images are ubiquitous in the lives of work of those who study and those who are studied. There is no lack of attention paid to the visual, merely a failure of perspective." (p. 179)
[Despite his beginning tone that research projects can be done without visual images, but with them research becomes different, his final tone is very strong and positive on what researchers can do with visual images.]
Banks introduces ways to incorporate visual images into social science research. According to him, anthropology has been a pioneer of using visual images as a form of visual anthropology. But he noted a growing body of literature on visual research in other disciplines in social science research in 1990s, and yet, methodological insights was confined to specific areas, such as the production of ethnographic films. Thus he presents some alternative methods and some advantages of using visual images. However, this book is heavily focused on photography. Acknowledging this, Banks found an advantage of using still photos for research in its ubiquity in modern society:
Still photography is a medium available to almost everyone in the world as either producer or consumer. and examples form the use of still photography can often serve to points arising from the use of all or most visual media . . . (p. x)
About photo-elicitation:
Banks introduced photo-elicitation. "It involves using photography to invoke comments, memory and discussion in the course of a semi-structure interview" (p. 87). Photos become the basis of discussion and provoking vague memories. Collier and Collier (1986, Visual anthropology: Photography as a research method), who pioneered photo elicitation (using archival photos), pointed out that photos can contribute to lessen awkwardness that interviewees might feel: eliminating direct eye contact and awkward silence. Banks pointed out that photo-elicitation is not straightforward in practice because of issues of photographic multivocality and the complexity of relationship between photo objects and human social relations. In this light, he discussed the use of other types of photos. Further, he argued for the potential of collaborative research through photo-elicitation. He wrote:
"Rather, the introduction of photographs to interviews and conversations sets off a kind of chain reaction: the photographs effectively exercise agency, causing people to do and think things they had forgotten, or to see things they had always known in a new way, . . . (p. 98)
For Banks, the term "method" is inseparable from theory and analysis , and yet, no less important than the others, because it makes social research an "an engagement, not an exercise in data collection" (p. 179) by letting research subjects co-operate with researchers, if not participate, in the research process based on their knowledge of their lives. He implies using visual images can be one of such methods.
The last paragraph well summarizes his view of images in research:
"Images exist materially in the world, are involved in particular and specific huamn social relations. Their meanings are historically and socially embedded, told through their internal and external narratives. They have authors and consumers, they are attributed with agency and affect the agency of others. All these features are discernible, documentable, and can be isolated for analysis and comparison. The practitioners of visual social research who bemoan the lack of attention paid to their labours are, in some ways, missing the point. Visual images are ubiquitous in the lives of work of those who study and those who are studied. There is no lack of attention paid to the visual, merely a failure of perspective." (p. 179)
[Despite his beginning tone that research projects can be done without visual images, but with them research becomes different, his final tone is very strong and positive on what researchers can do with visual images.]
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Through Navajo Eyes
: An exploration in film communication and anthropology. Sol Worth & John Adair (1997). (with a new forward, afterword, and illustrations by Richard Chalfen). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. (Originally published 1972)
Forward to the revised edition (ix-xxi)
Chalfen describes the late 1960s and early 1970s as active times in the development of visual anthropology when the Navajo Project was carried out in 1966 (both CFC and the Fogo Island Project embarked in 1967). He noted that the change in the field of visual anthropology was accelerating in 1990s (as of writing this forward) and described one significant change: Visual products are seen as part of a process of communication and demands critical attention. Thus, more correct is anthropology of visual communication rather than visual anthropology. Chalfen ascribes the Navajo Project as a cornerstone of this reformulation. This is clear in the purpose of this project described in Chapter 15:
As we have said, one of the aims of our research was to develop a method for collecting, analyzing, and comparing how various groups and cultures structured their world when making a film about it. (p. 228)
This research was focused on a methodological development to interpret ways in which people in different cultures structure their world in particular by using film production techniques. This context constituted the particular condition of collaborative filmmaking in this project. Chalfen stated:
At this time paradigms of collaborative ethnographic film research were simply not well developed. In this sense the communication scholar Worth and the cultural anthropologist Adair were breaking new ground by suggesting an "action research" collaboration along two dimensions--first, across discipline, and second across the politically loaded divide of scholar/outsider and "native"/insider. (p. xiii)
(In this regard, Chalfen noted some philosophical and ethical issues around the idea of "handing the camera over to others": first, it is not familiar practice (at least back then--me) and it is still Western-oriented thing to force people to do.)
Chalfen categorizes several patterns of participation. The Navajo Project is in the 6th: researchers ask local people to make a movie on anything they choose. This practice, and yet, preserves objectivist attitudes: little emphasis on researchers involvement, and lack of attention to problematizing issues under investigation. On the other hand, a project that immediately followed the Navajo Project draw my attention. In 1971, Adair, approached by a psychiatrist, developed a project on Navajo alcoholism. Two films were produced and one of them was immediately lost. This approach was an advance and actual application of the method to address real problems.
Chapter 16. Some concluding thoughts (252-262)
Afterword to the revised edition (276-341)
Forward to the revised edition (ix-xxi)
Chalfen describes the late 1960s and early 1970s as active times in the development of visual anthropology when the Navajo Project was carried out in 1966 (both CFC and the Fogo Island Project embarked in 1967). He noted that the change in the field of visual anthropology was accelerating in 1990s (as of writing this forward) and described one significant change: Visual products are seen as part of a process of communication and demands critical attention. Thus, more correct is anthropology of visual communication rather than visual anthropology. Chalfen ascribes the Navajo Project as a cornerstone of this reformulation. This is clear in the purpose of this project described in Chapter 15:
As we have said, one of the aims of our research was to develop a method for collecting, analyzing, and comparing how various groups and cultures structured their world when making a film about it. (p. 228)
This research was focused on a methodological development to interpret ways in which people in different cultures structure their world in particular by using film production techniques. This context constituted the particular condition of collaborative filmmaking in this project. Chalfen stated:
At this time paradigms of collaborative ethnographic film research were simply not well developed. In this sense the communication scholar Worth and the cultural anthropologist Adair were breaking new ground by suggesting an "action research" collaboration along two dimensions--first, across discipline, and second across the politically loaded divide of scholar/outsider and "native"/insider. (p. xiii)
(In this regard, Chalfen noted some philosophical and ethical issues around the idea of "handing the camera over to others": first, it is not familiar practice (at least back then--me) and it is still Western-oriented thing to force people to do.)
Chalfen categorizes several patterns of participation. The Navajo Project is in the 6th: researchers ask local people to make a movie on anything they choose. This practice, and yet, preserves objectivist attitudes: little emphasis on researchers involvement, and lack of attention to problematizing issues under investigation. On the other hand, a project that immediately followed the Navajo Project draw my attention. In 1971, Adair, approached by a psychiatrist, developed a project on Navajo alcoholism. Two films were produced and one of them was immediately lost. This approach was an advance and actual application of the method to address real problems.
Chapter 16. Some concluding thoughts (252-262)
Afterword to the revised edition (276-341)
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Visual Methods in Social Research
Reviewed by Mark Turin
BANKS, MARCUS. Visual methods in social research. xvi, 201 pp., tables, illus., bibliogr. London, Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001.
In this helpful introductory text, Banks offers advice to social scientists interested in using visual imagery in their work, and discusses the benefits of doing so. The author's approach is neither dogmatic nor evangelical, combining instead quiet confidence with cautionary good sense. The result is a very solid book which will be particularly useful for students in sociology and anthropology hoping to engage with issues of visual representation.
Visual methods in social research covers empirical approaches to image creation as well as image analysis. Drawing on wide-ranging examples, from holiday postcards to vintage film, Banks illustrates how methodology relating to visual form in the social sciences is '[either] scattered or confined to quite specific areas' (p. 2). The author makes effective use of rhetorical questions and discrete subsections (such as 'unnatural vision' and 'reading narratives'), thereby encouraging the reader to reconsider often-unquestioned assumptions about visual culture. Banks is well versed both topically and technologically, and jumps nimbly from caste in India to the Kayapo of Brazil, and from Polaroid to webcams. Moreover, by choosing explicitly contemporary reference points, such as Jorg Haider or Quentin Tarantino's now-cult film, Pulp fiction, he succeeds in engaging younger readers on their own visual territory.
A number of sections are particularly strong and worthy of special attention. Discussing the presence of foreign objects and non-indigenous bodies in ethnographic films, Banks points out that in future generations, the 'sight of "imported" artefacts would not be taken as mournful tokens of lost innocence, but celebrated as cultural appropriations' (p. 144). About the aptly named HADDON web-based meta-catalogue of archival ethnographic film and footage, the author's own creation, he is characteristically modest. The existence of this online catalogue and of a supporting website for the book under discussion, , embodies the hands-on approach which Banks advocates. While largely photo-centric, Visual methods also offers useful pointers for working with computer-based digital media, one advantage of which is the potential for 'research parity between sound, text and image' (p. 162). Increasingly, as academic publishing becomes a not-for-profit enterprise and publishers attempt to curtail their production costs, a well-conceived website of video clips and images can provide access to a supporting corpus of rich visual data which can help to illustrate a written text. Focusing on the Yanomamo interactive CD-ROM. Banks demonstrates how the use of multimedia 'opens up a non-linear space within which the detail can be absorbed at the user's own pace, and the arguments which rest upon that detail can be fully explored' (p. 165). This is the power of bits and bytes: the social researcher can 'usefully employ multimedia to state her own case but also to outline the alternative interpretations and provide access to the raw materials to allow the user to test them all' (p. 164). Banks concludes his otherwise cautious narrative with an unexpected, albeit entirely justified, sting in the tail. Having offered the disclaimer that his book contains little explicit theory, he takes a well-aimed swipe at scholars who advocate nothing other than 'swooping god-like into other people's lives and gathering "data" ... according to a predetermined theoretical agenda [which] strikes me not simply as morally dubious but intellectually flawed' (p. 179).
Students would be well served to read this book alongside James Monaco's now-classic How to read a film (currently in its third edition). In tandem, these background handbooks are amply sufficient to prepare researchers in social science with enough practical know-how, together with a healthy dose of reflexive understanding, to ensure the responsible use of visual imagery in their work. Banks is at his best when he stresses the material nature of visual media and the cultural nature of vision (bringing to mind John Berger's work), and in demonstrating how visual objects are entangled in social relations. In his introduction, Banks suggests that 'good visual research rests upon a judicious reading of both internal and external narratives' (p. 12). His own approach--critical yet mindful--does just this.
BANKS, MARCUS. Visual methods in social research. xvi, 201 pp., tables, illus., bibliogr. London, Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001.
In this helpful introductory text, Banks offers advice to social scientists interested in using visual imagery in their work, and discusses the benefits of doing so. The author's approach is neither dogmatic nor evangelical, combining instead quiet confidence with cautionary good sense. The result is a very solid book which will be particularly useful for students in sociology and anthropology hoping to engage with issues of visual representation.
Visual methods in social research covers empirical approaches to image creation as well as image analysis. Drawing on wide-ranging examples, from holiday postcards to vintage film, Banks illustrates how methodology relating to visual form in the social sciences is '[either] scattered or confined to quite specific areas' (p. 2). The author makes effective use of rhetorical questions and discrete subsections (such as 'unnatural vision' and 'reading narratives'), thereby encouraging the reader to reconsider often-unquestioned assumptions about visual culture. Banks is well versed both topically and technologically, and jumps nimbly from caste in India to the Kayapo of Brazil, and from Polaroid to webcams. Moreover, by choosing explicitly contemporary reference points, such as Jorg Haider or Quentin Tarantino's now-cult film, Pulp fiction, he succeeds in engaging younger readers on their own visual territory.
A number of sections are particularly strong and worthy of special attention. Discussing the presence of foreign objects and non-indigenous bodies in ethnographic films, Banks points out that in future generations, the 'sight of "imported" artefacts would not be taken as mournful tokens of lost innocence, but celebrated as cultural appropriations' (p. 144). About the aptly named HADDON web-based meta-catalogue of archival ethnographic film and footage, the author's own creation, he is characteristically modest. The existence of this online catalogue and of a supporting website for the book under discussion, , embodies the hands-on approach which Banks advocates. While largely photo-centric, Visual methods also offers useful pointers for working with computer-based digital media, one advantage of which is the potential for 'research parity between sound, text and image' (p. 162). Increasingly, as academic publishing becomes a not-for-profit enterprise and publishers attempt to curtail their production costs, a well-conceived website of video clips and images can provide access to a supporting corpus of rich visual data which can help to illustrate a written text. Focusing on the Yanomamo interactive CD-ROM. Banks demonstrates how the use of multimedia 'opens up a non-linear space within which the detail can be absorbed at the user's own pace, and the arguments which rest upon that detail can be fully explored' (p. 165). This is the power of bits and bytes: the social researcher can 'usefully employ multimedia to state her own case but also to outline the alternative interpretations and provide access to the raw materials to allow the user to test them all' (p. 164). Banks concludes his otherwise cautious narrative with an unexpected, albeit entirely justified, sting in the tail. Having offered the disclaimer that his book contains little explicit theory, he takes a well-aimed swipe at scholars who advocate nothing other than 'swooping god-like into other people's lives and gathering "data" ... according to a predetermined theoretical agenda [which] strikes me not simply as morally dubious but intellectually flawed' (p. 179).
Students would be well served to read this book alongside James Monaco's now-classic How to read a film (currently in its third edition). In tandem, these background handbooks are amply sufficient to prepare researchers in social science with enough practical know-how, together with a healthy dose of reflexive understanding, to ensure the responsible use of visual imagery in their work. Banks is at his best when he stresses the material nature of visual media and the cultural nature of vision (bringing to mind John Berger's work), and in demonstrating how visual objects are entangled in social relations. In his introduction, Banks suggests that 'good visual research rests upon a judicious reading of both internal and external narratives' (p. 12). His own approach--critical yet mindful--does just this.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Feminism and Film
Humm, Maggie. (1997). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Feminist Theory, Aesthetics and Film Theory: Mulvey, Kuhn, Kaplan and hooks (3-38)
Humm states that feminist aesthetics emphasizes the promotion of women as producers of art. However, ways in which feminist artists engaged with their audiences rejected the traditional concept of art creation, artistic individualism; they undertook performance, creating a moment for interacting with an audience. Another characteristic of feminist aesthetics is, Humm pointed out, a focus on women's social subjectivity on the basis that the personal is political. Thus, feminist art aims at transformation of traditional aesthetics built upon sexist oppression.
The author further examines feminist film theory focusing on Laura Mulvey (psychoanalytic), Annette Kuhn (materialism), E. Ann Kaplan (postmodernism), and bell hooks (Black feminism).
Feminist Theory, Aesthetics and Film Theory: Mulvey, Kuhn, Kaplan and hooks (3-38)
Humm states that feminist aesthetics emphasizes the promotion of women as producers of art. However, ways in which feminist artists engaged with their audiences rejected the traditional concept of art creation, artistic individualism; they undertook performance, creating a moment for interacting with an audience. Another characteristic of feminist aesthetics is, Humm pointed out, a focus on women's social subjectivity on the basis that the personal is political. Thus, feminist art aims at transformation of traditional aesthetics built upon sexist oppression.
The author further examines feminist film theory focusing on Laura Mulvey (psychoanalytic), Annette Kuhn (materialism), E. Ann Kaplan (postmodernism), and bell hooks (Black feminism).
Monday, April 26, 2010
The Methodological Dilemma
Gallagher, Kathleen. (Ed.). (2008). London and New York: Routledge.
Introduction (pp. 1-8)
Gallagher takes a constructionist perspective, writing, "Through our research and the choices we make, we imagine the world in ever more complex and interesting ways and re-commit ourselves to our intellectual and political projects. But we also risk our comfortable norms and truth claims each time we seek understanding" (pp. 1-2).
In the same vein, she argues that "researchers can mobilize theory [sic], in creative ways, to think through the 'pragmatics' of method" (p. 2). Thus she calls for unfettering our imagination for creative methods.
The Art of Methodology: A Collaborative Science (pp 67-81)
Gallagher proposes participatory research methods as a dialectical exchange between science and art. She argues that such exchange is indispensable in social sciences and humanities research, insinuating a potential for research that is politically engaged as well as pedagogically useful.
Introduction (pp. 1-8)
Gallagher takes a constructionist perspective, writing, "Through our research and the choices we make, we imagine the world in ever more complex and interesting ways and re-commit ourselves to our intellectual and political projects. But we also risk our comfortable norms and truth claims each time we seek understanding" (pp. 1-2).
In the same vein, she argues that "researchers can mobilize theory [sic], in creative ways, to think through the 'pragmatics' of method" (p. 2). Thus she calls for unfettering our imagination for creative methods.
The Art of Methodology: A Collaborative Science (pp 67-81)
Gallagher proposes participatory research methods as a dialectical exchange between science and art. She argues that such exchange is indispensable in social sciences and humanities research, insinuating a potential for research that is politically engaged as well as pedagogically useful.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Visual Research Methods: Where Are We and Where Are We Going?
Holm, Gunilla. (2008). In Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber & Patricial Leavy (Eds.), Handbook of Emergent Methods (pp. 325-341). New York and London: Guilford Press.
Holm pays attention to visual ethnography, action research, and photovoice as recent fields of visual methods. As of visual ethnography, Holm attunes, in particular, to Pink’s argument that reflexivity and intersubjective relationship between researcher and informants are critical to creating “negotiated versions of reality” (2005, p. 20). Holm also observes that recent visual ethnographical research takes on participatory action research by distributing photo cameras, for instance, to research participants. Holm remarks that photovoice, based on this technique, has not been widely used in education, anthropology or sociology, due to the nature of documentary and action research. Holm also notes that there were similar projects even before the groundbreaking photovoice project. She argues that problems with these projects, however, is that they were “mostly informative, and the strong advocacy component has been missing” (p. 330).
Holm pays attention to visual ethnography, action research, and photovoice as recent fields of visual methods. As of visual ethnography, Holm attunes, in particular, to Pink’s argument that reflexivity and intersubjective relationship between researcher and informants are critical to creating “negotiated versions of reality” (2005, p. 20). Holm also observes that recent visual ethnographical research takes on participatory action research by distributing photo cameras, for instance, to research participants. Holm remarks that photovoice, based on this technique, has not been widely used in education, anthropology or sociology, due to the nature of documentary and action research. Holm also notes that there were similar projects even before the groundbreaking photovoice project. She argues that problems with these projects, however, is that they were “mostly informative, and the strong advocacy component has been missing” (p. 330).
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Interdisciplinary agendas in visual research: re-situating visual anthropology
Pink, Sarah. (2003). Visual Studies, 18 (2), 179-192.
In her review of recent literature around visual research methods, which owe much to visual anthropology, Pink notes as common interests among visual researcher reflexivity, collaboration, ethics, and the relationship between the content, social context and materiality of images.
(p. 9)
Looking through the history of visual anthropology and contemporary visual culture studies, Pink concludes that across disciplines, critical approaches to the interpretation of images has departed from positivist truth-seeking.
Pink refers to reflexivity as a key concern among visual researchers, yet calls for clarification of distinct claims to and uses of reflexivity. Calling reflexivity "a kind of autobiography" (p. 130), Rose (2001, Visual Methodologies) writes certain discourses refuse to be reflexive. Foucauldian discourse analysis is one of them, for it analyzes power subconsciously embedded in texts. Pink agrees with Rose to the extent that these methodologies cannot be critical visual ones because they lack reflexivity.
For Pink, reflexivity in ethnography means a researcher's awareness of "how they look and understand when doing ethnography as well as when they look at images" (p. 188).
Pink further traces approaches to reflexivity in research: Whereas visual anthropologists such as Ruby regards reflexivity as an ethical issue, Emmison and Smith (2000, Researching the Visual) interpret reflexivity as a question of validity. For MacDougall, another visual anthropologist, a 'deep' reflexivity requires revealing "the position of the author in the very construction of the work" (1998:89, Transcultural Cinema; cited on the page 188). Critiquing Holliday (2000), who refered to reflexivity as "a mere buzz word" (p. 505), Pink writes Holliday's argument lack historical understanding of issues and debates around visual anthropology in the past couple of decades.
In sum up, Pink writes:
"Across the different approaches, reflexivity has commonly been coined as a need for understanding ‘‘where the researcher is coming from’’ and how this impacts on the knowledge
produced. Some leave this at a question of validity and research quality control. However, most visual anthropologists take a quite different tack. They argue that reflexivity should be integrated fully into processes of fieldwork and visual or written representation in ways that do not simply explain the researcher’s approach but reveal the very processes by which the positionality of researcher and informant were constituted and through which knowledge was produced during the fieldwork" (p. 189)
In her review of recent literature around visual research methods, which owe much to visual anthropology, Pink notes as common interests among visual researcher reflexivity, collaboration, ethics, and the relationship between the content, social context and materiality of images.
(p. 9)
Looking through the history of visual anthropology and contemporary visual culture studies, Pink concludes that across disciplines, critical approaches to the interpretation of images has departed from positivist truth-seeking.
Pink refers to reflexivity as a key concern among visual researchers, yet calls for clarification of distinct claims to and uses of reflexivity. Calling reflexivity "a kind of autobiography" (p. 130), Rose (2001, Visual Methodologies) writes certain discourses refuse to be reflexive. Foucauldian discourse analysis is one of them, for it analyzes power subconsciously embedded in texts. Pink agrees with Rose to the extent that these methodologies cannot be critical visual ones because they lack reflexivity.
For Pink, reflexivity in ethnography means a researcher's awareness of "how they look and understand when doing ethnography as well as when they look at images" (p. 188).
Pink further traces approaches to reflexivity in research: Whereas visual anthropologists such as Ruby regards reflexivity as an ethical issue, Emmison and Smith (2000, Researching the Visual) interpret reflexivity as a question of validity. For MacDougall, another visual anthropologist, a 'deep' reflexivity requires revealing "the position of the author in the very construction of the work" (1998:89, Transcultural Cinema; cited on the page 188). Critiquing Holliday (2000), who refered to reflexivity as "a mere buzz word" (p. 505), Pink writes Holliday's argument lack historical understanding of issues and debates around visual anthropology in the past couple of decades.
In sum up, Pink writes:
"Across the different approaches, reflexivity has commonly been coined as a need for understanding ‘‘where the researcher is coming from’’ and how this impacts on the knowledge
produced. Some leave this at a question of validity and research quality control. However, most visual anthropologists take a quite different tack. They argue that reflexivity should be integrated fully into processes of fieldwork and visual or written representation in ways that do not simply explain the researcher’s approach but reveal the very processes by which the positionality of researcher and informant were constituted and through which knowledge was produced during the fieldwork" (p. 189)
Monday, April 12, 2010
We've been framed: visualising methodology
Holliday, Ruth. (2000). The Sociological Review, 48 (4), 503-521.
Holliday asserts that reflexivity, alongside with multivocality, has arisen as an outcome of the post-colonial critique of the ethnocentrism of anthropology. She contends that multivocality, however, loses some of its criticality. She quotes Trinh (Visualizing theory : selected essays from V.A.R., 1990-1994, Author:Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Ed.). Trinh's interview with Nancy Chang.(1994). p.440):
"Multivocality...is not necessarily a solution to the problems of centralized and hierarchical knowledge when it is practised accumulatively--by juxtaposing voices that continue to speak within identified boundaries. Like the much abused concept of multiculturalism, multivocality here could also lead to the bland 'melting-pot' type of attitude, in which 'multi' means 'no'--no voice--or is used only to better mask the Voice--that very place from where meaning is put together.
As to reflexivity, Holliday argues, "Reflexivity is the latest in a long line of ... techniques aimed at ensuring the production of greater degrees of 'truth'," thus it can be viewed as a pseudo-positivist approach concerning greater truth.
Holliday stresses video as a confessional medium quoting from Michael Renov (1996, “Video Confessions” in Resolutions: Contemporary video Practices, Univ. of Minnesota Press):
In the case of video confessions, the virtual presences of a partner—the imagined other effectuated by the technology—turns out to be a more powerful facilitator of emotion than flesh-and-blood interlocutors. Camera operators, sound booms, cables, and clapperboards are hardly a boon to soul confession. (pp. 88-89; as cited on page 511)
Holliday’s argument about the power of video diaries in exploring one’s subjectivity is tied with this insight into video as a confessional medium. She wrote:
In terms of the video diaries, then, the power to present one’s subjectivity may override the risk of having that speech appropriated by others (for example, academics). Thus, the fullest confession opens up the greatest space to talk and affords the greatest power at that moment. (p. 512)
[In a participatory video, an interviewing situation may be similar to this confessional setting, for interviewers are much closer to interviewees compared with academics. Thus interviewees’ subjectivity can be more freely expressed and thus the medium of video can be more reflexive in bring out the lived/embodied experience of the interviewees.]
Holliday proposes video diaries as a “Queer Methodology” that “disrespects and disrupts disciplinary boundaries and discriplines”(p. 516) and an unconventional format of academic text.
Holliday asserts that reflexivity, alongside with multivocality, has arisen as an outcome of the post-colonial critique of the ethnocentrism of anthropology. She contends that multivocality, however, loses some of its criticality. She quotes Trinh (Visualizing theory : selected essays from V.A.R., 1990-1994, Author:Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Ed.). Trinh's interview with Nancy Chang.(1994). p.440):
"Multivocality...is not necessarily a solution to the problems of centralized and hierarchical knowledge when it is practised accumulatively--by juxtaposing voices that continue to speak within identified boundaries. Like the much abused concept of multiculturalism, multivocality here could also lead to the bland 'melting-pot' type of attitude, in which 'multi' means 'no'--no voice--or is used only to better mask the Voice--that very place from where meaning is put together.
As to reflexivity, Holliday argues, "Reflexivity is the latest in a long line of ... techniques aimed at ensuring the production of greater degrees of 'truth'," thus it can be viewed as a pseudo-positivist approach concerning greater truth.
Holliday stresses video as a confessional medium quoting from Michael Renov (1996, “Video Confessions” in Resolutions: Contemporary video Practices, Univ. of Minnesota Press):
In the case of video confessions, the virtual presences of a partner—the imagined other effectuated by the technology—turns out to be a more powerful facilitator of emotion than flesh-and-blood interlocutors. Camera operators, sound booms, cables, and clapperboards are hardly a boon to soul confession. (pp. 88-89; as cited on page 511)
Holliday’s argument about the power of video diaries in exploring one’s subjectivity is tied with this insight into video as a confessional medium. She wrote:
In terms of the video diaries, then, the power to present one’s subjectivity may override the risk of having that speech appropriated by others (for example, academics). Thus, the fullest confession opens up the greatest space to talk and affords the greatest power at that moment. (p. 512)
[In a participatory video, an interviewing situation may be similar to this confessional setting, for interviewers are much closer to interviewees compared with academics. Thus interviewees’ subjectivity can be more freely expressed and thus the medium of video can be more reflexive in bring out the lived/embodied experience of the interviewees.]
Holliday proposes video diaries as a “Queer Methodology” that “disrespects and disrupts disciplinary boundaries and discriplines”(p. 516) and an unconventional format of academic text.
‘I’m gonna show you what it’s really like out here’: the power and limitation of participatory visual methods
Packard, Josh. (2008). Visual Studies, 23 (1), 63-77.
Packard explores the boundaries of participatory visual methods based on his empirical research with the homeless. He finds the most dedicated effort of power-leveling research methods in handing over cameras to the research participants. In his argument, he contends that the ubiquity of low-cost cameras is important to participatory methods as participants are equally equipped with technology aptitude. For Packard, it is problematic that researchers have to "teach" participants how to operate a piece of equipment, for it tends to coalesce power to the researcher.
[This view is problematic primarily because of his deterministic perspective. The price of visual equipment tends to drop down, however, it does not guarantee that research participants may have equal access to the equipment.]
The research design Packard used was to giving a disposable camera to a homeless with the minimum instruction and the promise of remuneration of $5 upon their return with the camera the next day. He conducted interviews driven from the content of the photos they took. He wrote that there was little skepticism from participants when he explained his goal of this research--helping the homeless, etc.
Interpreting the styles of photos taken by the participants, Packard remarked its tendency of less affected convention and dominant photography rules. However, he rightly contends, "In order for knowledge to be truly powerful, it must be mobilized. Knowledge is power only to the extent to which it can be communicated" (p. 73).
[This sharp observation critiques overemphasis on non-dominant knowledge and practices outside of the mainstream. There may be a potential in a sense, but non-conventional practices and performances are not themselves a form of resistance.]
Packard combined in this research photo-elicitation with participant-driven data generation. However, in my opinion, this participatory visual method does not constitute participatory action research, for the data analysis is done solely by the researcher himself.
Packard explores the boundaries of participatory visual methods based on his empirical research with the homeless. He finds the most dedicated effort of power-leveling research methods in handing over cameras to the research participants. In his argument, he contends that the ubiquity of low-cost cameras is important to participatory methods as participants are equally equipped with technology aptitude. For Packard, it is problematic that researchers have to "teach" participants how to operate a piece of equipment, for it tends to coalesce power to the researcher.
[This view is problematic primarily because of his deterministic perspective. The price of visual equipment tends to drop down, however, it does not guarantee that research participants may have equal access to the equipment.]
The research design Packard used was to giving a disposable camera to a homeless with the minimum instruction and the promise of remuneration of $5 upon their return with the camera the next day. He conducted interviews driven from the content of the photos they took. He wrote that there was little skepticism from participants when he explained his goal of this research--helping the homeless, etc.
Interpreting the styles of photos taken by the participants, Packard remarked its tendency of less affected convention and dominant photography rules. However, he rightly contends, "In order for knowledge to be truly powerful, it must be mobilized. Knowledge is power only to the extent to which it can be communicated" (p. 73).
[This sharp observation critiques overemphasis on non-dominant knowledge and practices outside of the mainstream. There may be a potential in a sense, but non-conventional practices and performances are not themselves a form of resistance.]
Packard combined in this research photo-elicitation with participant-driven data generation. However, in my opinion, this participatory visual method does not constitute participatory action research, for the data analysis is done solely by the researcher himself.
Monday, December 7, 2009
The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader
Jones, A. (Ed.). (2003). The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. New York and London: Routledge.
Introduction (pp. 1-7)
Amelia Jones writes that visual culture is a rubric and a model of critical thinking about the world of images saturating contemporary life. According to her, visual culture studies, which originated from cultural studies in the 1950s, became a new genre of studies in the 80s, moving cultural studies beyond textual analysis, with a strong influence from feminism and other disciplines, such as anti-racist theory, art history, queer studies and film studies.
Defining visuality as “the conditions of how we see and make meaning of what we see” (p.1), Jones argues that feminism has acknowledged visuality as a key mode of gender inscription in Western culture, therefore feminism and visual culture deeply inform each other.
In particular Jones points out John Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing and Laura Mulvey’s (1975) “Visual Pleasure and narrative Cinama” as two seminal essays that marshal visual culture studies with feminism. She writes about the first author:
"In his epochal 1972 study of popular and fine art images, Ways of Seeing, John Berger noted ‘ [t]he way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe’(Berger , 1972, 3). Berger (among others) opened the way for conceiving the meaning of visual images as taking place in a process of exchange between the image (with its proposed ‘ways of seeing’) and the viewer, whose beliefs inform the way she or he interprets the work. Visual Culture, then, cuts through the conventional art-historical notion of meaning as inherent in an image, as presumably embedded there in perpetuity by the willful intentions of the artist…”(p.3)
Jones contests that visual culture studies became more complex with the influence of feminism since around 1970s.
"[S]ince around 1970, it has been feminist responses and approaches to visual images that have provided some of the strongest, most polemical, and most productive theories and critical strategies to come out of any of the disciplines or modes of analysis associated with visual culture. (p.3)"
Introduction to Part Two: Representation (pp. 33-36)
Jones asserts that both feminism and visual culture contribute to overturning (or dismantling) ‘reductivist (reductionist?)’ ‘modernist’ ‘formalist’ ‘neo-Kantian’ assumption that art works are AUTONOMOUS from the sociopolitical realm and their meaning is inherent to their structure and content created by the artist. This challenge, she argues, revolved around the notion of representation. While modernists regard representation as transparent and unmediated to the reality, visual culture and feminism studies interrogated the representation in relation to power and subjectivity.
[This dismantling process is aligned with multivocality, which is one of the critical notions of participatory (action) research and participatory video.]
From Ways of Seeing (J. Berger, 1972)
Regarding the nude of women as the principal European paining, Berger points out that, while men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at, thus turning themselves into an object of vision, a sight. Berger contrasts this cultural aspect with arts in non-European traditions, where women are as active as men within art works the theme of which is a sexual attraction.
[This signifies the ways in which women has been gazed within Western culture. Also, his comparison insinuates that the representation is a value-added cultural product, which continues to reify the existing cultural preferences embedded in power structure.]
Textual Strategies: The politics of art-making (Judith Barry & Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, pp. 53-59)
Barry and Flitterman attempt to theorize the practice of feminist art-making. They maintain that the initial feminists’ perspective that emphasized the importance of giving voice to women’s personal experience is facing a radical reconceptualization, which sees the personal experience within social and unconscious forces. They classify feminist art-making into four categories: 1) emphasizing female experiences and bodily processes, 2) viewing neglected women’s art as a sub-culture, 3) [I don’t understand] and 4) textual practice exploiting existing social contradiction, which emphasizes the constructedness of feminity by calling critical awareness for both the artist herself and her spectators. The authors argue that the fourth type can transform the spectator from a passive consumer to an active meaning producer. One exemplary art work, they mention in this article, is Mary Kelly’s (1975) Post-Partum Document.
[This fourth type resonates well in feminist PV perspective.]
The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female spectators (pp. 94-105).
(also appears in bell hooks (1992) In Black Looks: Race and Representation (pp. 115-131). Boston: South End Press.
Criticizing that mainstream feminist film criticism does not acknowledge black female spectatorship, hooks asserts that feminist film theories rooted in an ahistorical psychoanalytic framework suppress recognition of race and abstracts women. Thus, she argues that feminist film theories structure the discourse of women only within the perspective of white women. In particular, hooks develops the notion of cinematic negation, which means the absence of black female in cinema as a means of perpetuating white supremacy: in other words, the woman to be looked at and desired is white. Therefore, hooks argues that black women may develop an oppositional/critical gaze, which brings the pleasure of deconstructing films.
Hooks emphasizes active resistance that transcends beyond awareness:
"Many black women do not “see differently” precisely because their perceptions of reality are so profoundly colonized, shaped by dominant ways of knowing…Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking. While every black woman I talked to was aware of racism, that awareness did not automatically correspond with politicization, the development of an oppositional gaze… We do more than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions." (pp. 102-103)
Stressing the creation of space for the construction of radical black female subjectivity, hooks calls attention to film as a powerful site for critical intervention. Citing Illusions, Daughters of the Dust and Passion of Remembrance, hooks writes, “Opening up a space for the assertion of a critical black female spectatorship, they do not simply offer diverse representations, they imagine new transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity. Hooks argues that identity begins from recognition of difference, which is suppressed in mainstream cinema in the form of cinematic negation.
Difference, “A special third world women issue” (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 151-174)
Speaking that, as if sexism dehumanizes men, racism dehumanizes herself to the extent that it allows her to feel free from her neighbors’ troubles, Minh-ha argues that hegemony and racism are a pressing feminist issue.
In her discussion of authenticity, Minh-ha states that, “Today, planned authenticity is rife; as a product of hegemony and a remarkable counterpart of universal standardization, it constitutes an efficacious means of silencing the cry of racial oppression” (p.158). She argues, on the other hand, that identity should be understood as multiple presences such that ‘I’ is infinite layers.
One theme that reoccurs is subjectivity in feminist theory. What does it mean exactly?
judgment based on individual personal impressions and feelings and opinions rather than external facts -word reference. com
Introduction (pp. 1-7)
Amelia Jones writes that visual culture is a rubric and a model of critical thinking about the world of images saturating contemporary life. According to her, visual culture studies, which originated from cultural studies in the 1950s, became a new genre of studies in the 80s, moving cultural studies beyond textual analysis, with a strong influence from feminism and other disciplines, such as anti-racist theory, art history, queer studies and film studies.
Defining visuality as “the conditions of how we see and make meaning of what we see” (p.1), Jones argues that feminism has acknowledged visuality as a key mode of gender inscription in Western culture, therefore feminism and visual culture deeply inform each other.
In particular Jones points out John Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing and Laura Mulvey’s (1975) “Visual Pleasure and narrative Cinama” as two seminal essays that marshal visual culture studies with feminism. She writes about the first author:
"In his epochal 1972 study of popular and fine art images, Ways of Seeing, John Berger noted ‘ [t]he way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe’(Berger , 1972, 3). Berger (among others) opened the way for conceiving the meaning of visual images as taking place in a process of exchange between the image (with its proposed ‘ways of seeing’) and the viewer, whose beliefs inform the way she or he interprets the work. Visual Culture, then, cuts through the conventional art-historical notion of meaning as inherent in an image, as presumably embedded there in perpetuity by the willful intentions of the artist…”(p.3)
Jones contests that visual culture studies became more complex with the influence of feminism since around 1970s.
"[S]ince around 1970, it has been feminist responses and approaches to visual images that have provided some of the strongest, most polemical, and most productive theories and critical strategies to come out of any of the disciplines or modes of analysis associated with visual culture. (p.3)"
Introduction to Part Two: Representation (pp. 33-36)
Jones asserts that both feminism and visual culture contribute to overturning (or dismantling) ‘reductivist (reductionist?)’ ‘modernist’ ‘formalist’ ‘neo-Kantian’ assumption that art works are AUTONOMOUS from the sociopolitical realm and their meaning is inherent to their structure and content created by the artist. This challenge, she argues, revolved around the notion of representation. While modernists regard representation as transparent and unmediated to the reality, visual culture and feminism studies interrogated the representation in relation to power and subjectivity.
[This dismantling process is aligned with multivocality, which is one of the critical notions of participatory (action) research and participatory video.]
From Ways of Seeing (J. Berger, 1972)
Regarding the nude of women as the principal European paining, Berger points out that, while men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at, thus turning themselves into an object of vision, a sight. Berger contrasts this cultural aspect with arts in non-European traditions, where women are as active as men within art works the theme of which is a sexual attraction.
[This signifies the ways in which women has been gazed within Western culture. Also, his comparison insinuates that the representation is a value-added cultural product, which continues to reify the existing cultural preferences embedded in power structure.]
Textual Strategies: The politics of art-making (Judith Barry & Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, pp. 53-59)
Barry and Flitterman attempt to theorize the practice of feminist art-making. They maintain that the initial feminists’ perspective that emphasized the importance of giving voice to women’s personal experience is facing a radical reconceptualization, which sees the personal experience within social and unconscious forces. They classify feminist art-making into four categories: 1) emphasizing female experiences and bodily processes, 2) viewing neglected women’s art as a sub-culture, 3) [I don’t understand] and 4) textual practice exploiting existing social contradiction, which emphasizes the constructedness of feminity by calling critical awareness for both the artist herself and her spectators. The authors argue that the fourth type can transform the spectator from a passive consumer to an active meaning producer. One exemplary art work, they mention in this article, is Mary Kelly’s (1975) Post-Partum Document.
[This fourth type resonates well in feminist PV perspective.]
The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female spectators (pp. 94-105).
(also appears in bell hooks (1992) In Black Looks: Race and Representation (pp. 115-131). Boston: South End Press.
Criticizing that mainstream feminist film criticism does not acknowledge black female spectatorship, hooks asserts that feminist film theories rooted in an ahistorical psychoanalytic framework suppress recognition of race and abstracts women. Thus, she argues that feminist film theories structure the discourse of women only within the perspective of white women. In particular, hooks develops the notion of cinematic negation, which means the absence of black female in cinema as a means of perpetuating white supremacy: in other words, the woman to be looked at and desired is white. Therefore, hooks argues that black women may develop an oppositional/critical gaze, which brings the pleasure of deconstructing films.
Hooks emphasizes active resistance that transcends beyond awareness:
"Many black women do not “see differently” precisely because their perceptions of reality are so profoundly colonized, shaped by dominant ways of knowing…Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking. While every black woman I talked to was aware of racism, that awareness did not automatically correspond with politicization, the development of an oppositional gaze… We do more than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions." (pp. 102-103)
Stressing the creation of space for the construction of radical black female subjectivity, hooks calls attention to film as a powerful site for critical intervention. Citing Illusions, Daughters of the Dust and Passion of Remembrance, hooks writes, “Opening up a space for the assertion of a critical black female spectatorship, they do not simply offer diverse representations, they imagine new transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity. Hooks argues that identity begins from recognition of difference, which is suppressed in mainstream cinema in the form of cinematic negation.
Difference, “A special third world women issue” (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 151-174)
Speaking that, as if sexism dehumanizes men, racism dehumanizes herself to the extent that it allows her to feel free from her neighbors’ troubles, Minh-ha argues that hegemony and racism are a pressing feminist issue.
In her discussion of authenticity, Minh-ha states that, “Today, planned authenticity is rife; as a product of hegemony and a remarkable counterpart of universal standardization, it constitutes an efficacious means of silencing the cry of racial oppression” (p.158). She argues, on the other hand, that identity should be understood as multiple presences such that ‘I’ is infinite layers.
One theme that reoccurs is subjectivity in feminist theory. What does it mean exactly?
judgment based on individual personal impressions and feelings and opinions rather than external facts -word reference. com
Monday, September 7, 2009
More visualizing. more methodologies
: on video, reflexivity and qualitative research. Sarah Pink. The Sociological Review. 2001. 586-599.
Pink regards reflexivity as a key theme in the development of visual anthropology and explores the potential of video for reflexive approach to qualitative research in sociology and anthropology. She cites that in some recent work, video methods and visual methods in general has been situated as part of a reflexive methodology. For instance, for Ruby a reflexive approach to visual anthropology is ethical such that the researcher, as the producer of visual materials, reveals the constructedness of his or her argument by showing his or her own particular way of generating and processing the data.
Pink expands her idea of reflexivity to giving agency to the subject as see from Michaels' study on the impact of television on Aboriginal communities. Similarly, the project where mothers with HIV recorded their messages on video for their children demonstrates a reflexive approach: The producers, mothers, project their own images through negotiation of self-image and performance. The images produced as a result bring spontaneous and vivid information to the researchers. Another example of a reflexive approach to video in the production of ethnographic knowledge is mentioned in Ferrándiz's work, where he recorded video in collaboration with his informants. Through the video work, Ferrández not only learned ritual practices performed by his informants but also the way in which a camera create a visual truth by catalyzing certain aspects of the rituals. In short, such reflexive approaches deepened our understanding of the subject under study.
Pink regards reflexivity as a key theme in the development of visual anthropology and explores the potential of video for reflexive approach to qualitative research in sociology and anthropology. She cites that in some recent work, video methods and visual methods in general has been situated as part of a reflexive methodology. For instance, for Ruby a reflexive approach to visual anthropology is ethical such that the researcher, as the producer of visual materials, reveals the constructedness of his or her argument by showing his or her own particular way of generating and processing the data.
Pink expands her idea of reflexivity to giving agency to the subject as see from Michaels' study on the impact of television on Aboriginal communities. Similarly, the project where mothers with HIV recorded their messages on video for their children demonstrates a reflexive approach: The producers, mothers, project their own images through negotiation of self-image and performance. The images produced as a result bring spontaneous and vivid information to the researchers. Another example of a reflexive approach to video in the production of ethnographic knowledge is mentioned in Ferrándiz's work, where he recorded video in collaboration with his informants. Through the video work, Ferrández not only learned ritual practices performed by his informants but also the way in which a camera create a visual truth by catalyzing certain aspects of the rituals. In short, such reflexive approaches deepened our understanding of the subject under study.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Principles of Visual Anthropology
Paul Hockings. (Ed.). 2003. 3rd Ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Camera and Man (Jean Rouch, 79-98)
When Rouch mentions in this chapter that we owe all we try to do to Dziga Vertov and Robert Flaherty, who worked in different continents without connections in the 1920s, he has in his mind “the participant camera” as a way of expressing reality. The ways the camera participated are different and Rouch explains: For Flaherty, it was a way of recounting a story collaboratively with Nanook because a camera let ‘Nanook see his own pictures from the very moment of their conception (p.82)’. For Vertov, on the other hand, it is rather of ‘recording small elements of reality’ through a camera lens. Rouch quotes:
“I am the ‘cine-eye,’ I am the mechanical eye; I am the machine that will show you the world as only the machine can see it. Henceforth, I shall be liberated from human mobility” (1923:34; cited on page 83)
Rouch explains Vertov’s idea of cine-eye as seeing with the camera, recording on film and editing. This idea is better explored through thematic reality that Vertov tried to construct:
“…in its willingness to reveal people with absolutely no pretense, to catch them at any moment, to stop as soon as they leave off complaining, to imprison their thoughts…But is not sufficient to present fragments of reality on the screen to represent life by its crumbs. These fragments must be elaborated upon so as to make an integrated whole which is, in turn, the thematic reality…”(1940: 443-444; cited on page 83).
Rouch rightly argues that with extraordinary equipment available today we must re-invent a new language of doing ethnography. In particular, it is important for him that ethnographic films meet the public in their own right. In order to become so, he asserts, the anthropologist needs feedback from the group they research as if a stimulant for mutual understanding, through which he can finally come down from his ivory tower. Rough extols the participant camera as the only tool which allows the anthropologist to communicate with the group they study, as Vertov and Flaherty did without being conscious of what they were doing.
Observational Cinema (Colin Young, 99-113)
Young recalls a conference in 1968, where the point is made that film is not objective but may objectify. In other words, “the camera tends to lie but the audience tends to believe” (p.100), he explains. He reveals the limit of observational cinema, or its ideology through the comment Herb Di Gioia made: each occasion of being shut-out or of missing things dramatized the limitation of the observational method and justified a more fictional approach. In his conclusion, Young argues that conferences about method are arguments about power and representatives of one approach are racist about all others. He suggests that we just need to learn other rules to avoid confusion if different languages are used.
Beyond Observational Cinema (David MacDougall, 115-132)
MacDougall writes beyond observational cinema lies the possibility of a participatory cinema, which gives its subjects access to the film for correction, addition and illuminations. He contends that through such an exchange a film can begin to reflect the ways in which the subjects perceive the world. In his emphasis of a researcher’s role as a cultural catalyst, he writes:
“The values of a society lie as much in its dreams as in the reality it has built. Often it is only by introducing new stimuli that the investigator can peel back the layers of a culture and reveal its fundamental assumptions” (p.127).
On the other hand, he explains the importance of the subjects’ involvement as follows:
“[T]he fleeting recognition of the film crew which gives a sense of candor but really reveals nothing. For a film to gain meaning from the breakdown of old narrative conventions, that recognition must develop into a genuine conversation” (p. 127).
Into the end of this article, originally published in the mid-1970s, he added a postscript in 1994. In this postscript, he states that the borderline between observational and participatory cinema now appears more blurred and suggests a principle of multiple authorship that leads to an intertextual cinema. There is no much explanation in depth about the intertextual cinema in this postscript, but he argues that through such an approach ethnographic film may better address conflicting views of reality between observers and observed, and reciprocal observation and exchange among them will increasingly matter. [ A new way of participation needs to be explored. So far, the participation is in a way very limited like giving a seat to the subjects in a round table of filmmaking. ]
Camera and Man (Jean Rouch, 79-98)
When Rouch mentions in this chapter that we owe all we try to do to Dziga Vertov and Robert Flaherty, who worked in different continents without connections in the 1920s, he has in his mind “the participant camera” as a way of expressing reality. The ways the camera participated are different and Rouch explains: For Flaherty, it was a way of recounting a story collaboratively with Nanook because a camera let ‘Nanook see his own pictures from the very moment of their conception (p.82)’. For Vertov, on the other hand, it is rather of ‘recording small elements of reality’ through a camera lens. Rouch quotes:
“I am the ‘cine-eye,’ I am the mechanical eye; I am the machine that will show you the world as only the machine can see it. Henceforth, I shall be liberated from human mobility” (1923:34; cited on page 83)
Rouch explains Vertov’s idea of cine-eye as seeing with the camera, recording on film and editing. This idea is better explored through thematic reality that Vertov tried to construct:
“…in its willingness to reveal people with absolutely no pretense, to catch them at any moment, to stop as soon as they leave off complaining, to imprison their thoughts…But is not sufficient to present fragments of reality on the screen to represent life by its crumbs. These fragments must be elaborated upon so as to make an integrated whole which is, in turn, the thematic reality…”(1940: 443-444; cited on page 83).
Rouch rightly argues that with extraordinary equipment available today we must re-invent a new language of doing ethnography. In particular, it is important for him that ethnographic films meet the public in their own right. In order to become so, he asserts, the anthropologist needs feedback from the group they research as if a stimulant for mutual understanding, through which he can finally come down from his ivory tower. Rough extols the participant camera as the only tool which allows the anthropologist to communicate with the group they study, as Vertov and Flaherty did without being conscious of what they were doing.
Observational Cinema (Colin Young, 99-113)
Young recalls a conference in 1968, where the point is made that film is not objective but may objectify. In other words, “the camera tends to lie but the audience tends to believe” (p.100), he explains. He reveals the limit of observational cinema, or its ideology through the comment Herb Di Gioia made: each occasion of being shut-out or of missing things dramatized the limitation of the observational method and justified a more fictional approach. In his conclusion, Young argues that conferences about method are arguments about power and representatives of one approach are racist about all others. He suggests that we just need to learn other rules to avoid confusion if different languages are used.
Beyond Observational Cinema (David MacDougall, 115-132)
MacDougall writes beyond observational cinema lies the possibility of a participatory cinema, which gives its subjects access to the film for correction, addition and illuminations. He contends that through such an exchange a film can begin to reflect the ways in which the subjects perceive the world. In his emphasis of a researcher’s role as a cultural catalyst, he writes:
“The values of a society lie as much in its dreams as in the reality it has built. Often it is only by introducing new stimuli that the investigator can peel back the layers of a culture and reveal its fundamental assumptions” (p.127).
On the other hand, he explains the importance of the subjects’ involvement as follows:
“[T]he fleeting recognition of the film crew which gives a sense of candor but really reveals nothing. For a film to gain meaning from the breakdown of old narrative conventions, that recognition must develop into a genuine conversation” (p. 127).
Into the end of this article, originally published in the mid-1970s, he added a postscript in 1994. In this postscript, he states that the borderline between observational and participatory cinema now appears more blurred and suggests a principle of multiple authorship that leads to an intertextual cinema. There is no much explanation in depth about the intertextual cinema in this postscript, but he argues that through such an approach ethnographic film may better address conflicting views of reality between observers and observed, and reciprocal observation and exchange among them will increasingly matter. [ A new way of participation needs to be explored. So far, the participation is in a way very limited like giving a seat to the subjects in a round table of filmmaking. ]
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Image-Based Research
A sourcebook for qualitative researchers. (1998). Jon Prosser (Ed.). Bristol, PA: Falmer Press.
Visual Anthropology: Image, Object and Interpretation (Marcus Banks, 9-23)
"It is the materiality of the visual that allows us to group together a diverse range of human activities and representational strategies under the banner of visual anthropology and to treat them as visual systems" (p. 12).
An Argument for Visual Sociology (Douglas Harper, 24-41)
Finding roots of visual sociology in visual ethnography and documentary photography, Harper asserts that new ethnography, in other words, post-modern ethnography, is partial true rather than complete document, thus ethnographic knowledge should bring the reader to the cultural world rather than report on it from a distance. He supports his argument with statements written by Marcus and Fischer (Anthropology as Cultural Critique, 1987, p. 135):
"Post-modern ethnography...does not move toward abstraction, away from life, but back to experience. It aims not to foster the growth of knowledge but to restructure experience; not to understand objective reality, for that is already established by common sense, nor to explain how we understand, for tha is impossible, but to reassimilate, to reintegrate the self in society and to restructure the conduct of everyday life"(quoted on page 31).
Film-making and Ethnographic Research (Paul Henley, 42-59)
According to Henley, those who deny the objectivity of cinematographic images see "the camera as a catalyst, provoking events, situations and relationships that are revealing precisely because of their atypicality" and "as the medium of a trance-like state whereby the film-maker becomes fully engaged in the lives of the films' protagonists and thereby achieves an understanding that is inaccessible to those who insist on remaining neutral and distant" (p. 43, quoted from Rouch).
Henley states that Rouch, who regarded Flaherty and Vertov as "the inspired precursors of ethnographic film-making", with Flaherty, shared a commitment to active participation with the protagonists in the creating of his films and fictionalization of their lives; with Vertov, shared a belief in the camera as a means of insight beyond everyday observable reality. Grounding in these influences, Rouch introduced documentary conventions into ethnographic documentation.
Henley finds the difficulty of theorizing documentary film in anthropology in film's communicative nature: while the dominant theoretical paradigms were grounded in generalization and abstraction until 1980s, film is concrete and particular such that it is most effective at representing the performative aspects of culture defined in the broadest sense, such as political events, religious rituals, symbolic aspects of everyday life. Recent the paradigmatic change from the positivist tradition to interpretative approaches in anthropology shed light on roles of ethnographic film-making to its strengths, Henley argues. In this paradigm, social life is not a mere expression of underlying structure but idiosyncratic and contingent to day-to-day basis of social performances of many kinds. Thus, Henley writes, "Ethnographic description thus becomes a process of describing and elucidating these performances rather than demonstrating their function or role in an abstract system" (p.51). He elaborates the strength of this shift in emphasis from general schemas to the understanding particular cases: "when greater emphasis is laid on the individual ethnographic case, contextualization can emerge from within the film, often in the form of comments made by the protagonists themselves. Over time, such comments will retain their cultural integrity and be less vulnerable to fluctuations in theoretical fashion" (p. 51).
Henley traces ethnographic film-making that involves protagonists' participation to the anthropologists at the University of Philadelphia who gave cameras to Navajo Indians and inner city teenagers in 1960s (Worth & Adair, 1972, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology). Henley notes that whereas these early experiments were motivated exclusively by academic research interests, recent collaborative ventures between researchers and indigenous film-makers tend to be more political and ask social justice.
The Status of Image-Based Research (Jon Prosser, 97-112)
Prosser overviews this article by briefing the history of visual anthropology and visual anthropology, where he finds 'fragmentation' as the root cause of its limited status in academia. He argues that fragmentation represents part of the shifting landscape of contemporary qualitative research. He quotes Ruby's penetrative argument about the reason for the peripheral status of visual anthropology:
When engaged in ethnography, the researcher must convert the complex experience of field work to words in a notebook and then transform those words onto other words shifted through analytic methods and theories. This logocentric approach to understanding denies much of the multisensory experience of trying to know another culture. The promise of visual anthropology is that it might provide an alternative way of perceiving culture-perception constructed through the lens (1996, Visual Anthropology, in D. Levinson and M. Ember (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, vol. 4, 1345-51. NY: Henry Holt and Co.)
To him, reflexivity attempts to reveal explicitly the process by which data and finding were produced. His criticism lies in that reflexivity, of which the emphasis is given to the process, is only partial in many cases: for example, The Ax Fight (1975), misses reflexive insights of inter-personal reactivity, he mentions. [He points out a very important aspect of the discourse of reflexivity, which has been so much formalistic. What about the insights of the researcher or the researched? These should be explored.]
Visual Anthropology: Image, Object and Interpretation (Marcus Banks, 9-23)
"It is the materiality of the visual that allows us to group together a diverse range of human activities and representational strategies under the banner of visual anthropology and to treat them as visual systems" (p. 12).
An Argument for Visual Sociology (Douglas Harper, 24-41)
Finding roots of visual sociology in visual ethnography and documentary photography, Harper asserts that new ethnography, in other words, post-modern ethnography, is partial true rather than complete document, thus ethnographic knowledge should bring the reader to the cultural world rather than report on it from a distance. He supports his argument with statements written by Marcus and Fischer (Anthropology as Cultural Critique, 1987, p. 135):
"Post-modern ethnography...does not move toward abstraction, away from life, but back to experience. It aims not to foster the growth of knowledge but to restructure experience; not to understand objective reality, for that is already established by common sense, nor to explain how we understand, for tha is impossible, but to reassimilate, to reintegrate the self in society and to restructure the conduct of everyday life"(quoted on page 31).
Film-making and Ethnographic Research (Paul Henley, 42-59)
According to Henley, those who deny the objectivity of cinematographic images see "the camera as a catalyst, provoking events, situations and relationships that are revealing precisely because of their atypicality" and "as the medium of a trance-like state whereby the film-maker becomes fully engaged in the lives of the films' protagonists and thereby achieves an understanding that is inaccessible to those who insist on remaining neutral and distant" (p. 43, quoted from Rouch).
Henley states that Rouch, who regarded Flaherty and Vertov as "the inspired precursors of ethnographic film-making", with Flaherty, shared a commitment to active participation with the protagonists in the creating of his films and fictionalization of their lives; with Vertov, shared a belief in the camera as a means of insight beyond everyday observable reality. Grounding in these influences, Rouch introduced documentary conventions into ethnographic documentation.
Henley finds the difficulty of theorizing documentary film in anthropology in film's communicative nature: while the dominant theoretical paradigms were grounded in generalization and abstraction until 1980s, film is concrete and particular such that it is most effective at representing the performative aspects of culture defined in the broadest sense, such as political events, religious rituals, symbolic aspects of everyday life. Recent the paradigmatic change from the positivist tradition to interpretative approaches in anthropology shed light on roles of ethnographic film-making to its strengths, Henley argues. In this paradigm, social life is not a mere expression of underlying structure but idiosyncratic and contingent to day-to-day basis of social performances of many kinds. Thus, Henley writes, "Ethnographic description thus becomes a process of describing and elucidating these performances rather than demonstrating their function or role in an abstract system" (p.51). He elaborates the strength of this shift in emphasis from general schemas to the understanding particular cases: "when greater emphasis is laid on the individual ethnographic case, contextualization can emerge from within the film, often in the form of comments made by the protagonists themselves. Over time, such comments will retain their cultural integrity and be less vulnerable to fluctuations in theoretical fashion" (p. 51).
Henley traces ethnographic film-making that involves protagonists' participation to the anthropologists at the University of Philadelphia who gave cameras to Navajo Indians and inner city teenagers in 1960s (Worth & Adair, 1972, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology). Henley notes that whereas these early experiments were motivated exclusively by academic research interests, recent collaborative ventures between researchers and indigenous film-makers tend to be more political and ask social justice.
The Status of Image-Based Research (Jon Prosser, 97-112)
Prosser overviews this article by briefing the history of visual anthropology and visual anthropology, where he finds 'fragmentation' as the root cause of its limited status in academia. He argues that fragmentation represents part of the shifting landscape of contemporary qualitative research. He quotes Ruby's penetrative argument about the reason for the peripheral status of visual anthropology:
When engaged in ethnography, the researcher must convert the complex experience of field work to words in a notebook and then transform those words onto other words shifted through analytic methods and theories. This logocentric approach to understanding denies much of the multisensory experience of trying to know another culture. The promise of visual anthropology is that it might provide an alternative way of perceiving culture-perception constructed through the lens (1996, Visual Anthropology, in D. Levinson and M. Ember (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, vol. 4, 1345-51. NY: Henry Holt and Co.)
To him, reflexivity attempts to reveal explicitly the process by which data and finding were produced. His criticism lies in that reflexivity, of which the emphasis is given to the process, is only partial in many cases: for example, The Ax Fight (1975), misses reflexive insights of inter-personal reactivity, he mentions. [He points out a very important aspect of the discourse of reflexivity, which has been so much formalistic. What about the insights of the researcher or the researched? These should be explored.]
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Performing Urban Collectivity
An van. Dienderen. (2007). Visual Intervention:Applied Visual Anthropology. Sarah Pink (Ed.).
Dienderen records her observation of the community film project held by an artist in an immigrant neighborhood in Brussels.
In the author's interview, one of the participants, who acted in the film, said, "I believe it was, I'm sure it was therapy for me, precisely helping me to digest what had happened to me. Just by talking about it, I freed myself. At least I felt relieved from this feeling locked inside me for such a long time" (p. 204).
The author quotes Pink's perspective about visual anthropology in social intervention, "In these projects applying visual anthropology involves promoting self awareness by representing individuals and groups to others and to themselves" (Pink, 2004:8, Visual Anthropology Review. 20(1), 3-16; as cited on p. 253). Pink calls this intervention intersubjectivity between researchers and the local, developed through reflexive process of collaboration and research.
But the artist who directed this project hired professional crew to shoot and edit the film, which seemed to entail incongruity. The author writes this aspect by quoting the concept that Raoul Ruiz used to describe a Western cinema: a Central Conflict Theory (Ruiz, 1995:14). The authors writes, "According to him, this theory has turned into a predatory theory, a system of ideas that devours and enslaves any other idea that might restrain its activity" (p. 266). As the author writes, Pink clearly differentiates visual anthropological production from commercial film/video production.
Raoul Ruiz (1995). Poetics of Cinema. NY: Distributed Art Publishers.
Fabian, J (1990). Power and Performance.
Dienderen records her observation of the community film project held by an artist in an immigrant neighborhood in Brussels.
In the author's interview, one of the participants, who acted in the film, said, "I believe it was, I'm sure it was therapy for me, precisely helping me to digest what had happened to me. Just by talking about it, I freed myself. At least I felt relieved from this feeling locked inside me for such a long time" (p. 204).
The author quotes Pink's perspective about visual anthropology in social intervention, "In these projects applying visual anthropology involves promoting self awareness by representing individuals and groups to others and to themselves" (Pink, 2004:8, Visual Anthropology Review. 20(1), 3-16; as cited on p. 253). Pink calls this intervention intersubjectivity between researchers and the local, developed through reflexive process of collaboration and research.
But the artist who directed this project hired professional crew to shoot and edit the film, which seemed to entail incongruity. The author writes this aspect by quoting the concept that Raoul Ruiz used to describe a Western cinema: a Central Conflict Theory (Ruiz, 1995:14). The authors writes, "According to him, this theory has turned into a predatory theory, a system of ideas that devours and enslaves any other idea that might restrain its activity" (p. 266). As the author writes, Pink clearly differentiates visual anthropological production from commercial film/video production.
Raoul Ruiz (1995). Poetics of Cinema. NY: Distributed Art Publishers.
Fabian, J (1990). Power and Performance.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Picturing the Social Landscape
: Visual Methods and the Sociological Imagination. (2004). By Caroline Knowles & Paul Sweetman (Eds.). New York: Routledge.
Introduction (1-17) (Knowles & Sweetman)
Three key theoretical approaches to visual images within social research are introduced here: 1) in realist paradigm images are regarded as evidence of the reality, as in photo-journalism. 2)From poststructural perspective, images help to construct reality as a part of regime of truth. 3) From semiotics perspective, existing images are texts through which cultural significances or ideologies are uncovered.
Drawing on conceptual and analytic possibilities of visual methods, Knowles and Sweetman write, "Theory or analysis must involve the rearrangement of popular forms of social knowing so that hitherto unknown and non-apparent things become visible. Theory must involve discovery: uncovering what is not readily apparent, connections between one thing and another, the underlying assuptions from which we operate" (p. 7). [By rearrangement, they mean recontexualization that calls for attention of the invisible in a new context.] They attempt to explore visual images' capacity to reveal what is hidden in the inner mechanism of the ordinary and the taken for granted (p. 7).
In explaining the process of revealing the hidden and connecting the personal and particular with the social and general, the authors center on C. Wright Mills's 'sociological imagination', by which he means a mechanism that links the larger historical and social scenes in which lives are set with individual experience and biography (in cited on 7). The authors assert that a set of techniques of visual strategies allow us to understand how the smallest units of social analysis operate in relation to broader social landscapes and bigger process, thus enabling social imagination. By visual techniques, Knowles and Sweetman mean an analytically charged set of methodologies which incline researchers towards the tracing of connections between things of quite different social scope and scale (p. 8). [This reasoning is not clear to explain why visual methods elicit social imagination. In addtion, they heavily rely on a researcher's gaze or capacity in the interpretaion/analysis process of images. If so, how can the research justify the connection that she or he makes between the personal and the social? ]
With regard to the criticism about polysemic nature and highly subjective analysis of pictorial representations, the authors argue that writing, for instance, is also polysemic and in spite of polysemic nature, images present the content, such as smile or laugu, which are usually erased in a writing process.
Jenks (1995) mentions that pictorial representation is, like all forms of representation, about selection, abstraction and transformation (in cited on 13).
Working with Visible Evidence (John Grady, 18-31)
He argues conventional social science training helps image-based research while images may also intrigue insights: "Something in the picture, or something glanced at in passing that could be pictured, will suggest an idea or hint at a link to a theory. It is from such moments that insight is born and from such insights that full-blown interpretive and research strategies can be constructed" (p. 27). [There are many sources that instigate insight. Then are images just one of them or do they have any advantages? The polysemic nature and wholeness of visual representation may elicit more prolific insight or imagination than other forms, such as poem, story, etc. I need to define characteristics of images against other forms of representation.]
My Visual Diary (Elizabeth Chaplin, 36-48)
Among the reasons for keeping a daily photographic diary, Chaplin mentions to look critically, abstractly and actively and to intervene taken-for-granted views. Cultural studies emphasizes that images are polysemic, thus its meaning floats. However, Chaplin points out that photographs, a special kind of images, are in debate in that the 'camera' produces a trace or record what has been photographed. To her, the photographic trace is a record of something which could have been recorded differently and open to many different interpretations. She asserts that the degree of objectivity and subjectivity involved in each photograph varies image to image (p. 47).
Reflecting the Self (Ruth Holliday, 49-64)
It is about the author's reflection on a video-diary project that was conducted with nine 'respondents' to examine the performative nature of queer identities.
Holliday underpins that video-diaries provide respondents with potential for greater reflection and editorial control over the materials disclosed. Observing two styles of the material submitted, she argues that self-conscious appears to be the result of performing in front of a known other while relative candor springs up more when the video is taken by themselves. She furthers the confessional aspect of video diaries on the ground of our relation to media productions: because we are more conditioned as a viewer than a producer, we imagine ourselves as audience for our own productions, thus diarists becomes confessional through a narcissistic identification with an imagined viewer (p. 53). Holliday cites Michael Renov to support her idea. Renov (1996) argues that video is a particulary confessional medium.
"confessional discourse of the diaristic sort addresses itself to an absent imaginary other...In the case of video confessions, the virtual presence of a partner--the imagined other effectuated by the technology--turns out to be a more powerful facilitator of emotion than flesh-and-blood interlocutors. Camera operators, sound booms, cables, and clapperboards are hardly a boon to soul confession" (88-89; in cited on 52).
Holliday foregrounds the concept of reflexivity, which has been centered on methodological debates in ethnographic and anthropological studies. Grounded in modernity, reflexivity, she asserts, relies on a stable sense of self and an internal process of self-examination. However, she contends that as in the mirror/camera lens, the self is reflected back from an external location, thus reflexivity should be regarded as external positions, understandings and explanations. Furthermore, she argues that (auto)biography, as a form of reflexive research, may reprivilege 'authorial authority', typically when the research is based on the experience or identity of the researcher, because it constitutes a kind of moral and political high ground from which critical analysis is less important than experience (p. 57).
Opposing the notion that the camera lens reflects the world, she argues it 'refracts' it through the process of selection, eduting and the production of multiple interpretative positions. Through the 'refraction' of the camera lens, she maintains, the centrality of the academic researcher in the production of social realities diminishes.
Imaging the Intangible (Tony Wincup, 79-92)
He asserts that without memory our life consists of momentary experiences with little relation to each other while memory itself is 'slippery and fragile', thereby we tend to keep personal mnemonic objects as a means of sustaining our memory and identity. Wincup suggests that such identity is constructed more circuitously by witnessing others and comparing with our own than by looking inwards at oneself. In this regard, Bourdieu (1984:172, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste) writes, "social identity is defined and asserted through difference" (as cited in Wincup on 82).
Wipcup regards a photograph as a sign, of which the connotations are constructed between the photographer and viewers, thus possession multivocality, and pays particular attention to the role of a photograph that visualizes intangible concepts through tangible elements within its frame. In this matter, he writes, "Through symbolic cultural patterning, tangible objects constitute a significant and lasting medium of intangibl social expression" (p.91).
Telling the story of Linda Lord through Photographs (Ana Maria Mauad and Alicia Rouverol, 178-192)
In this chapter discussed are the significance of a personal story in building historical contexts--as Steven Biel argues, "it is the individual stories, uncovered through oral history, that often challenge our historical generalization" (p. 179)--as well as the intertextual power of a combination of images and text. The authors state that images and texts, taken together, generates a dialogue between the two elements to the extent that they collectively tell a cohesive narrative. Through this intertexuality between text and images, they argue, researchers can gain particular insights and create new understanding of a subject, and write, "It is also the photographs--by revealing multiple stories, contrasts and contradictions, ambiguities and uncertainties--enrich the analysis, deepen and complicate the story we can tell through words" (p.188). To these authors, it is the multiplicity and polyphony of images that widen our knowledge.
Introduction (1-17) (Knowles & Sweetman)
Three key theoretical approaches to visual images within social research are introduced here: 1) in realist paradigm images are regarded as evidence of the reality, as in photo-journalism. 2)From poststructural perspective, images help to construct reality as a part of regime of truth. 3) From semiotics perspective, existing images are texts through which cultural significances or ideologies are uncovered.
Drawing on conceptual and analytic possibilities of visual methods, Knowles and Sweetman write, "Theory or analysis must involve the rearrangement of popular forms of social knowing so that hitherto unknown and non-apparent things become visible. Theory must involve discovery: uncovering what is not readily apparent, connections between one thing and another, the underlying assuptions from which we operate" (p. 7). [By rearrangement, they mean recontexualization that calls for attention of the invisible in a new context.] They attempt to explore visual images' capacity to reveal what is hidden in the inner mechanism of the ordinary and the taken for granted (p. 7).
In explaining the process of revealing the hidden and connecting the personal and particular with the social and general, the authors center on C. Wright Mills's 'sociological imagination', by which he means a mechanism that links the larger historical and social scenes in which lives are set with individual experience and biography (in cited on 7). The authors assert that a set of techniques of visual strategies allow us to understand how the smallest units of social analysis operate in relation to broader social landscapes and bigger process, thus enabling social imagination. By visual techniques, Knowles and Sweetman mean an analytically charged set of methodologies which incline researchers towards the tracing of connections between things of quite different social scope and scale (p. 8). [This reasoning is not clear to explain why visual methods elicit social imagination. In addtion, they heavily rely on a researcher's gaze or capacity in the interpretaion/analysis process of images. If so, how can the research justify the connection that she or he makes between the personal and the social? ]
With regard to the criticism about polysemic nature and highly subjective analysis of pictorial representations, the authors argue that writing, for instance, is also polysemic and in spite of polysemic nature, images present the content, such as smile or laugu, which are usually erased in a writing process.
Jenks (1995) mentions that pictorial representation is, like all forms of representation, about selection, abstraction and transformation (in cited on 13).
Working with Visible Evidence (John Grady, 18-31)
He argues conventional social science training helps image-based research while images may also intrigue insights: "Something in the picture, or something glanced at in passing that could be pictured, will suggest an idea or hint at a link to a theory. It is from such moments that insight is born and from such insights that full-blown interpretive and research strategies can be constructed" (p. 27). [There are many sources that instigate insight. Then are images just one of them or do they have any advantages? The polysemic nature and wholeness of visual representation may elicit more prolific insight or imagination than other forms, such as poem, story, etc. I need to define characteristics of images against other forms of representation.]
My Visual Diary (Elizabeth Chaplin, 36-48)
Among the reasons for keeping a daily photographic diary, Chaplin mentions to look critically, abstractly and actively and to intervene taken-for-granted views. Cultural studies emphasizes that images are polysemic, thus its meaning floats. However, Chaplin points out that photographs, a special kind of images, are in debate in that the 'camera' produces a trace or record what has been photographed. To her, the photographic trace is a record of something which could have been recorded differently and open to many different interpretations. She asserts that the degree of objectivity and subjectivity involved in each photograph varies image to image (p. 47).
Reflecting the Self (Ruth Holliday, 49-64)
It is about the author's reflection on a video-diary project that was conducted with nine 'respondents' to examine the performative nature of queer identities.
Holliday underpins that video-diaries provide respondents with potential for greater reflection and editorial control over the materials disclosed. Observing two styles of the material submitted, she argues that self-conscious appears to be the result of performing in front of a known other while relative candor springs up more when the video is taken by themselves. She furthers the confessional aspect of video diaries on the ground of our relation to media productions: because we are more conditioned as a viewer than a producer, we imagine ourselves as audience for our own productions, thus diarists becomes confessional through a narcissistic identification with an imagined viewer (p. 53). Holliday cites Michael Renov to support her idea. Renov (1996) argues that video is a particulary confessional medium.
"confessional discourse of the diaristic sort addresses itself to an absent imaginary other...In the case of video confessions, the virtual presence of a partner--the imagined other effectuated by the technology--turns out to be a more powerful facilitator of emotion than flesh-and-blood interlocutors. Camera operators, sound booms, cables, and clapperboards are hardly a boon to soul confession" (88-89; in cited on 52).
Holliday foregrounds the concept of reflexivity, which has been centered on methodological debates in ethnographic and anthropological studies. Grounded in modernity, reflexivity, she asserts, relies on a stable sense of self and an internal process of self-examination. However, she contends that as in the mirror/camera lens, the self is reflected back from an external location, thus reflexivity should be regarded as external positions, understandings and explanations. Furthermore, she argues that (auto)biography, as a form of reflexive research, may reprivilege 'authorial authority', typically when the research is based on the experience or identity of the researcher, because it constitutes a kind of moral and political high ground from which critical analysis is less important than experience (p. 57).
Opposing the notion that the camera lens reflects the world, she argues it 'refracts' it through the process of selection, eduting and the production of multiple interpretative positions. Through the 'refraction' of the camera lens, she maintains, the centrality of the academic researcher in the production of social realities diminishes.
Imaging the Intangible (Tony Wincup, 79-92)
He asserts that without memory our life consists of momentary experiences with little relation to each other while memory itself is 'slippery and fragile', thereby we tend to keep personal mnemonic objects as a means of sustaining our memory and identity. Wincup suggests that such identity is constructed more circuitously by witnessing others and comparing with our own than by looking inwards at oneself. In this regard, Bourdieu (1984:172, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste) writes, "social identity is defined and asserted through difference" (as cited in Wincup on 82).
Wipcup regards a photograph as a sign, of which the connotations are constructed between the photographer and viewers, thus possession multivocality, and pays particular attention to the role of a photograph that visualizes intangible concepts through tangible elements within its frame. In this matter, he writes, "Through symbolic cultural patterning, tangible objects constitute a significant and lasting medium of intangibl social expression" (p.91).
Telling the story of Linda Lord through Photographs (Ana Maria Mauad and Alicia Rouverol, 178-192)
In this chapter discussed are the significance of a personal story in building historical contexts--as Steven Biel argues, "it is the individual stories, uncovered through oral history, that often challenge our historical generalization" (p. 179)--as well as the intertextual power of a combination of images and text. The authors state that images and texts, taken together, generates a dialogue between the two elements to the extent that they collectively tell a cohesive narrative. Through this intertexuality between text and images, they argue, researchers can gain particular insights and create new understanding of a subject, and write, "It is also the photographs--by revealing multiple stories, contrasts and contradictions, ambiguities and uncertainties--enrich the analysis, deepen and complicate the story we can tell through words" (p.188). To these authors, it is the multiplicity and polyphony of images that widen our knowledge.
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