Negotiating Closed Doors and Constraining Deadlines: The Potential of Visual Ethnography to Effectually Explore Private and Public Spaces of Motherhood and Parenting

Abstract

Pregnancy and motherhood are increasingly subjected to surveillance by medical professionals, the media, and the general public, and discourses of ideal parenting are propagated alongside an admonishment of the perceived “failing” maternal subject. However, despite this scrutiny, the mundane activities of parenting are often impervious to ethnographic forms of inquiry. Challenges for ethnographic researchers include the restrictions of becoming immersed in the private space of the home where parenting occurs and an institutional structure that discourages exploratory and long-term fieldwork. This paper draws on four studies, involving thirty-four participants, that explored their journeys into the space of parenthood and their everyday experiences. The studies all employed forms of visual ethnography, including artifacts, photo elicitation, timelines, collage, and sandboxing. The paper argues that visual methodologies can enable access to unseen aspects of parenting and engender forms of temporal extension, which can help researchers to disrupt the restrictions of tightly time bounded projects.

‘I just don’t think it’s that natural’: adolescent mothers’ constructions of breastfeeding as deviant

“…2011, Mannay et al . 2018a, 2018b). This reversal of power through using participant‐generated prompts also enabled us to avoid beginning conversations with direct questioning which might have been perceived as confrontational or reminiscent of approaches used by authorities (e.g.…”

“…Brown 2016, Ellis‐Sloan 2014, Mannay et al . 2018a, 2018b, Moore and Reynolds 2017) and marginalised mothers’ infant feeding experiences more generally (Gillies 2007, Grant et al . 2018, Mannay et al .…”

“…2018, Mannay et al . 2018a, 2018b). Experiences of breastfeeding as a key aspect and decision in young mother’s reproductive lives are comparatively absent.…”

Researching Home’s Tangible and Intangible Materialities by Photo-Elicitation

“…Participants were also more relaxed and interested; important to our case, Collier noted that photo-elicitation "to some extent approximated visiting the plants with them in person" (849). There seem to be widespread agreement on these direct benefits of photo-elicitation (Coleman, Kearns, and Wiles 2016;Drew, Duncan, and Sawyer 2010;Harper 2002;King, Williams, and Gleeson 2019;Mannay et al 2018;Roger and Blomgren 2019).…”

“…Second and relatedly, the method aims at empowering participants to express what is important to them; it aims to coproduce knowledge e.g. by transgressing the limitations of a priori designed interview outlines (Mannay et al 2018). However, Gauntlett and Holzwarth (2006, 82) argued that the claims of participant empowerment are "sometimes rather over-ambitious".…”