‘I did it my way’: voice, visuality and identity in doctoral students' reflexive videonarratives on their doctoral research journeys

Abstract

This paper presents accounts of four UK doctoral students' engagement in a Higher Education Academy project which used digital video to promote reflexivity on their doctoral journeys. Proceeding from participants' accounts of the production of their videonarratives, the paper analyzes the relations between doctoral research, reflexivity and the use of digital video, and their articulation in different ways by the participants. As an 'assemblage', the written form of the paper aims to evoke both the collaborative design of the project, in that it is constructed as a multivocality, a series of 'plateaus ' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 22), and also the multiple, shifting and always in-process nature of identity, immanent in each individual's account. The accounts address how epistemological, ontological and ethical considerations are articulated within visual and vocal re-presentations of the self in the individual videonarratives. Each narrative both does (and doesn't) resonate with the other narratives and each offers insights into the specificities of particular doctoral journeys. In experimenting with this form of presentation, we aim to bypass traditional accounts of research 'findings' as a form of transparent knowledge production and, instead, work within a mode of representation which seeks to acknowledge the 'masks of methodology ' (Lather 2007, 119).

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