Visual and Screen-Based Research Methodologies

Abstract

Visual and screen-based research practices have a long history in social-science, humanities, education, and creative-arts based disciplines as methods of qualitative research. While approaches may vary substantially across visual anthropology, sociology, history, media, or cultural studies, in each case visual research technologies, processes, and materials are employed to elicit knowledge that may elude purely textual discursive forms. As a growing body of visual and screen-based research has made previously-latent aspects of the world explicit, there has been a concomitant appreciation that visual practices are multisensory and must also be situated within a broader exploration of embodied knowledge and multisensory (beyond the visual) research practice. As audio-visual projects such as Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan (2013), Rithy Panh's S-21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003), and Margaret Loescher’s Cameras at the Addy (2003) all demonstrate, screen-based research practices are both modes of, and routes to, knowledge. These projects also demonstrate ways in which screen-based visual research may differ from research exclusively delivered in written form, most specifically in their capacity to document and audio-visually represent intersubjective, embodied, affective, and dynamic relationships between researchers and the subjects of their research. Increasingly, as a range of fields reveal that the incorporative body works as an integrated “perceptive field” as it processes sensory stimuli, visual and screen-based research practices will fulfil an important role in facilitating scholarly access to intuitive, affective, embodied, and analytical comprehension.

Image Technologies and Visual Methodologies: Reflections, Experimentations, and Future Redirections

“…Photography and social science research have shared a long, troubling history (Mees & Murray, 2019). Over the last few decades, researchers have embraced the camera and photographic image as a possible tool for engaging and empowering research participants.…”

Intermediality in Academia: Creative Research through Film

“…It is precisely my awareness of my own positionality and lived experience that led me to make films as an expression of my research interests and explorations, but these films are also creative works in their own right, and it is that status that helps to create an environment for them to assert their own opacity and resistance to appropriation and incorporation into the modes of "transparent" knowledge production often expected of academics. Mees and Murray (2019) provide a cogent overview of discriminatory uses of visual media in the nineteenth and twentieth century by researchers, which means that we cannot take for granted that intermedial methods will serve the liberation and empowerment of those who have been oppressed and/or marginalised in the past and present. Working within a decolonial feminist ethos, my "envisioning" practice intends to counter the absences from and/or exploitation of Black African women, as represented in (audio)visual archives of the past, by recognising and affirming, through the film medium, Black African women's empowering, creative, and contemporary filmmaking practices.…”