Screen-Capturing Mobility in Participatory Research

• In Event: 15.018 - New Directions in Visual Research

Abstract

Drawing on a mobile video ethnography conducted with high school students on their daily subway commutes to and from a public school in New York City, this paper presents possibilities and challenges for documenting and representing literacy practices on the move. In their travels across the city, students use smartphones to read and write for school, collaborate on coursework, correspond with friends and family, share music, play games, and more. In this way, their material and embodied mobilities are entangled with literate mobilities across an array of spaces, times, languages, modes, media, and ideas. Tracing literacy trajectories (Leander & Rowe, 2006) through such dense knots of activity requires working alongside participants to develop and revise research methods attentive to fleeting, distributed, affective, and sensory dimensions of their practice (Law & Urry, 2004). Paying particular attention to relations between methods of screen capture recording and video observation, this paper discusses affordances and challenges of integrating multiple sources of visual data and multiperspectival analyses into unified representations of mobile literacies.

To attend to and make sense of relations among students’ linguistic, literate, material and embodied mobilities, I draw upon theories informing the transdisciplinary field mobility studies; namely, (post)phenomenology, non-representational theory, and postcolonial theory (Idhe, 2009; Thrift, 2011; Tolia-Kelly 2010). These frames illuminate interdependences of literacies and embodied and material practices of movement, infrastructures and systems that enable or disable movement, and representations, ideologies, and meanings attached to both movement and stillness (Sheller, 2014).

I employ a number of ethnographic and participatory methods to trace out these interdependences. In addition to conducting mobile observations and interviews (Elwood & Martin, 2000), my participants and I engage in “time-space mapping” (Ivanič et al., 2009) to track patterns of movement to, from, and through schools. We also trace “text trajectories” (Kell, 2013) to show how academic writing, text messaging, social networking, and game play interact to create networks of meaning-making extending across space-time. These methods have resulted in the collection of multiple data sources over the course of this two-year project; including, computer and smartphone screen captures, still photographs, video recordings of students’ literacy practices on move, and go-along interview transcripts.

Taken together, these sources reveal resonances and disruptions across the pluralities of moving bodies, objects, ideas, and texts that make up and connect literacy practices and scenes across space-time. Through painstaking processes of syncing smartphone screen capture recordings with video footage, participants and I began to see how literate activity unfolded around fellow passengers, seating and standing options, hand holds, jostles, brake screeches, and time between stops. These and other observations prompted us to experiment with ways to situate multiple sources of visual data—namely, screen capture recordings and video observations—alongside each other through participatory video production and editing. This presentation details this process of collaborative representation and analysis and discusses how such methods might enhance the stories we tell from visual data by encouraging collaborative analysis, sensory and affective recollection, and the co-production of empathetic understandings (Spinney, 2015).

Author

• Brice Nordquist, Syracuse University