Reanimating Video in Research by Thinking Cinematically: Slowing Down and Speeding Up

• In Event: Writing Together-Apart: Navigating the Post-Qualitative, New Materialist, and Critical Posthumanist Research Across Disciplines

Abstract

Objectives & Perspectives

Grounded in examples, including re-animated video clips from a Norwegian preschool, our paper argues for the need to re-animate video in research by thinking cinematically. Current video research tends to assume, and affirm, dichotomies between subject/subject, truth/fiction and data/analysis; the technology supposedly captures ‘what really happens’. Drawing on the historical entanglement between art and science, which post-qualitative research often aims to reestablish, we trouble and complicate these conventional ideas of representation when video is used in qualitative research. Through the analysis of examples we challenge a. conceptions of unilinear time and progress (whether as nations or individually), and b. the binary logic that has brought into existence discriminatory research practices. Through Deleuze’s film theory (1986, 1989) and Barad’s agential realism (2007) normative concepts such as human/non-human/lesser-than-human and the relations between them that are at the heart of the current environmental and societal crises and pandemics are reconfigured. Philosophical perspectives such as the existence of multiple temporalities and the decentering of the (child) human in educational research are important gestures towards decolonising qualitative research practices and western knowledge systems that inform our pedagogies.

Modes of inquiry & Data

In our presentation we draw on our chapter in the new book series to exemplify certain possibilities of how to disrupt traditional ways of recording, analyzing and presenting video-based research. But we will also include new examples from a current research project examining the daily life of toddlers in a Norwegian early childhood institution to demonstrate the possibilities of thinking cinematically in video research and why it matters. Our analysis centres on the cinematic techniques used in research to explore the special quality of the video medium and its possibility to disrupt habitual ways of seeing and thinking as well as establishing connections previously left unexplored. Cinematic techniques such as framing, zooming, montaging, slow motion and time-lapse can create affective imagery beyond the traditional binaries taken for granted in mainstream qualitative video-based research. We exemplify this through three examples of slowing down and speeding up including time-lapses.


Insights & Scholarly Significance

Three (interrelated) main points build this argument for why this posthumanist/postqualitative reanimating of video in research through thinking cinematically is important when responding to current crises such as the four pandemics. This approach involves the possibility to challenge and reconfigure the following:

a) conceptions of progression, and development in pedagogical situations through disrupting unilinear conceptions of time. This challenges capitalist ideas of competition, progress and economic growth.
b) conceptions of human agency and reestablishes relations between human and nonhuman agents through the power of technology to foreground relations previously unseen. It disrupts humanist binaries between nature/material/human and makes visible a relational ontology - of special importance to meet the current environmental crisis.
c) colonising knowledge systems in relation to whose/what voice counts in pedagogical situations. Disturbing these knowledge systems when working with video creatively allows to intervene in dominant teacher/learner and body/mind discourses as well as the systemic inequalities these binaries support.

Authors

• Soern Finn Menning, University of Agder

• Karin Saskia Murris, University of Oulu