Video-based Ethnography Blog #10 It’s hard to believe we’ve arrived at the end of the summer semester! This summer’s reading have shifted my outlook on video in a variety of ways — from the positionality of the filmmaker to reflexive power of video, these readings have explored concepts that have…

Introduction Gibson (2005), drawing from ethnomethodology in a Bourdieusian framework, offers a focus on the structures that organize participants choices in production (38). The author posits, “…videos, thus, are always mediated by the participants’ internalized perceptions of the social world and thei positions in it. …

Video-based Ethnography Blog #9 By nature, humanity are selfish creatures in many ways; we want what we want, and we want to keep what we can get. We want control over our lives. Academics, especially, want control over their research, and creatives too want control over their work. …

Video-based Ethnography Blog #8 “A video diary is a digitized diary used for research with purposes similar to those of studies using written diaries; that is, the collection of data on informants’ lives over an extended period. The informants are supplied with a video camera and receive the necessary instruction…

Video-based Ethnography Blog #7 Ethnography, on the surface, seems to be this sweeping, grand field where a researcher travels to the end of the earth studying “foreign” (I mean this in jest) contexts and bringing back novel ideas to Western minds. Microethnography takes that and says: no. Streeck and Mehus…

Video-based Ethnography Blog #6 Every once in a while, in this academic space in which we live and work, we get a small ray of hope. Being an academic researcher often feels like living on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean — you and your ideas are…

Video-based Ethnography Blog #5 I have a mentor (who’s a dentist) who regularly reminds me that my work is both an art and a science; the mediums which I use to craft stories and accounts is technical in nature and requires a certain level of skill and ability. However, storytelling…

Video-based Ethnography Blog #4 For as long as I can remember, when other creators ask me to self-identify who I am, my answer is always simple: I am a storyteller. The stories change and the mediums change and the outputs change, but there are always stories and they are always…

Video-based Ethnography Blog #3 Documentary film-making as a category covers a broad range of stylistic choices, types of media, and varying perspectives of film. Although Minh-Ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam and Lee’s 4 Little Girls share this commonality in category, they could not be any different from each other…