DOING VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY (Part 1)

DOING VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Contemporary times call for new visual methodologies. We need collaborative, ethical, responsible and interventional methods capable of showing up and communicating local and global challenges and imagining, proposing and initiating routes to new and better futures. Visual ethnography is at the centre of this move. How does visual ethnography embrace new ways of being, emerging technologies and the complexities and contingencies that surround our possible futures?

Images are 'everywhere'. They permeate our academic work, everyday lives, digital and social media worlds, societal narratives and imagined futures. They inhabit and inspire our imaginations, technologies, texts and conversations. In the contemporary moment, more than ever before, camera and screen technologies are also almost everywhere. They involve an expanding range of forms and modes of imaging, including smartphone, wearable, surveillance, and other embedded and mobile photographic devices.

Doing Visual Ethnography responds to the needs of and demands on qualitative researchers in this evolving context of research and practice. Here, alongside the new intelligent and automated technologies, previously the stuff of science fiction, which are entering our everyday lives, new modes of everyday hope, anxiety and uncertainty are emerging. This book presents an approach to research that accounts for and harnesses this human experience, imagination and action. It goes beyond the focus on visual methods of research and representation that dominates existing accounts of and guides to visual methods or ethnographic film: it invites researchers to a more theoretically and technologically advanced visual ethnography practice for studying the worlds we inhabit; and it sets out a new approach to qualitative methodology that embeds visual practice in research which accounts for futures, impact and the interventional and interdisciplinary possibilities of the social sciences.

We have seen rapid changes in the ways that visual ethnography can be practiced over the last twenty years. As personal digital and connected mobile technologies and media became ubiquitous, images were embedded in our social activities and encounters and in the digital architectures of the environments we move through in our everyday lives. Images are used to record and reconstruct the past through, for instance, archiving and visualisation techniques. In the present the visual is inextricably interwoven with our personal identities, narratives, lifestyles, cultures and societies, as well as with definitions of time, space, place, reality and truth. Utopian and dystopian images inhabit our mediated worlds, giving view to possible futures that we might hope for or dread, while it has been imagined that future images will be viewed through emerging screenless technologies. Our experience and use of the visual continues to evolve as people and organisations, in varied ways across the world, make and improvise with images of different kinds in ways afforded by new and emerging technological innovation and possibilities. As new modes of Artificial Intelligence and Automated Decision-Making increasingly (and sometimes invisibly) become embedded in everyday technologies, services and processes, we will encounter new ways of making, experiencing and researching with, through and about the visual. Visual surveillance and big data analytics have rapidly become part of the way social and human worlds are understood in the dominant narratives and visualisations of industry and the public sector. The visual content of everyday images is equally subsumed under this agenda, making it still more important for sensitive, ethical and situated visual ethnography research to be undertaken to both understand these changes and intervene where vast databases of visual images may be harvested and analysed in ways that are decontextualised from the everyday worlds where they were produced, and have shifting meanings and significance.

Ethnographic research practice is likewise intertwined with visual technologies, images, metaphors and ways of seeing, sensing and imagining. When ethnographers produce photographs or video, and use the continually evolving range of apps, emojis and sharing platforms that are associated with them, these images, and the experience of producing and discussing them, become part of their ethnographic knowledge and imagination. Images are part of how we experience, imagine, learn and know. They are continually shared across everyday life and research contexts. They are part of how we hope and fear, as well as how we communicate and represent knowledge. In research contexts images may inspire conversations, conversation might invoke images; conversation and performances visualise and draw absent printed or digital images into their narratives through verbal descriptions and references to them. Likewise, just as an image might invoke a memory of an embodied affective experience, experiences also inspire images. Photography and video are not simply recordings of life, but rather they are always emergent from the contingent and continually changing circumstances of life. Images are thus an inevitable part of the experiential environments we live and research in; Doing Visual Ethnography is an invitation to engage with images, technologies and ways of seeing, experiencing and imagining as part of the ethnographic process.

WHY DO WE NEED VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY?

Still and moving images have gradually become integral elements of the work of ethnographers, even when ethnographic research might have little direct focus on the visual as its subject matter. In part, this has been due to the realisation amongst many ethnographers that the visual elements of our research and ways of knowing in the world need to be attended to, whether this involves working with historical analogue photography or film, with the mixed photographic formats that most people will have as part of their life collections of images, or with new technologies. However, it is also clear that we are living in a moment where the circumstances of our research mean that it would be difficult to be a contemporary ethnographer without engaging with digital media, technologies and the social, material and infrastructural environments and practices associated with them. This applies to the way these aspects figure in our own lives, in our research practice and in the lives of those who participate in our research. Our fieldwork sites will often not only cross physical localities but also traverse the digital and material worlds and temporalities that are brought together as everyday lives are lived. This context, which constitutes the circumstances for Digital Ethnography, also has powerful implications for the practice of visual ethnography. Digital visual technologies and media, and the platforms and apps through which we engage with them, are part of how we constitute ethnographic knowledge, as well as being used to create representations of ethnographic knowledge. As such, visual ethnographic media and materials offer us forms of continuity between fieldwork in academic and applied research contexts that other media cannot. It is now almost inevitable that as ethnographers we will encounter and benefit from digital visual technologies and images in the course of our research and scholarly practice. We therefore need to understand how they become implicated in the production and dissemination of the ways of knowing that are part of the ethnographic process.

Along with their growing prevalence in ethnographic practice, visual methods and media are also part of how many of us learn to become ethnographers. Visual methods are taught as topics of university courses and in advanced research training workshops, and a global spread of conferences and seminars that focus on visual methods has emerged. While visual ethnography might be said to have originally grown from the disciplines of anthropology and sociology, it is by now definitely not restricted to them. The benefits of a visually oriented ethnographic approach are increasingly recognised in other disciplines including geography, as well as in interdisciplinary fields such as consumer research, health studies, education studies, media studies, organisation studies, design research, human-computer-interaction research, buildings research and in reflexive arts practice. There is a corresponding wealth of existing literature about visual methods, selected elements of which I discuss in the following chapters of this book, spread across academic disciplines and informed by a range of methodological approaches. This context is a stark contrast to the late nineteen nineties when I set about creating the first edition of this book. At that time I believed that visual ethnography was an emergent field that needed to be brought into view. I now see it as a growing and dynamic international and interdisciplinary field of practice.

Finally, we need visual ethnography because if social science researchers are to do research that has impact in the world, that is interventional and that communicates across disciplines and sectors, we need to be able to gain deep insights that get under the surface of what is visible, to share our findings and to engage others in our arguments and in the stories of those people who participate in our research. Visual research practice and the use of visual and digital, still and moving images and dissemination platforms offer us a powerful mode of engaging both inside and outside academia. It enables us to step up our engagement with contemporary societal challenges. This might be achieved through collaboration to generate visual ethnographic insights with those who wish to learn from our work, as a direct response to those who are advancing powerful predictive and deterministic narratives about futures, and through contesting narratives that bring ethnographic knowing and detail to the fore. Visual ethnography brings our audiences up close to our research findings and participants, it invites them to sense and feel other people's experiences. As such it offers a powerful interventional device for researchers who wish to participate in or influence the shaping of our as yet unknown and uncertain futures.