“Welcome back to our channel!” – Reframing the Role of the Camera in Video Research

• In Event: Video Interaction Analysis Lab: Working Processes as Relation Building in Times of Unrest

Abstract

This paper calls for IA researchers to reconsider how participants relate to cameras. Building on critiques of the assumed neutrality of video data (e.g., Vossoughi & Escudé, 2016) and responding to shifts in how cameras function in everyday life (e.g., social media; performative documentation), we present two vignettes that show participants actively co-constructing the video record. These cases reveal how participants generate new roles for the camera, new imagined audiences, and even influence the direction of our research.

Case One: In a summer camp for immigrant and refugee students, Moana—who was often labeled a troublemaker—used the research camera to establish new identities. During camp, she spoke to the camera in Swahili, asking it to help her make friends at school. She donned our headphones, embodying a singer, and later used our lavalier mic as a stethoscope. These examples opened up a co-authored third space between her and the camera (Gutierrez et al., 1999; Gutierrez, 2008), blending her everyday practices with classroom practices and expanding the roles available to her. Rather than adhering to the script of a “well-behaved student,” the presence of the camera allowed Moana to co-author new identities that took her learning in expansive directions.

Case Two: In another study, we conducted student interviews following an embodied activity. A week after interviews concluded, one student complained that she hadn’t been interviewed. With support from their teacher, she and a friend used an iPad to self-record an interview, which was later shared with the research team.
In this video, new relationships emerged between the students, researchers, and camera as a direct result of self-taping. The girls shifted between addressing us as researchers (“Miss you guys!”) and imaginary Youtube followers (“Welcome back to our channel!”). At times, they playfully mimicked us as researchers (ie: sitting upright and asking scripted questions), highlighting the ways they’d internalized our “professional researcher” personas. At other times, they’d break character to giggle and make eye contact with each other, commenting on their performed research-participant roles. These visible repairs signaled a shift from a seemingly objective video record to one where the purpose of the recording blurred: familiarity with the camera as a vlogging platform (particularly with the iPad’s self-facing camera) shifted our understanding of “documentation” and allowed for the students to author their own commentary of the video record and our data collection as a whole.

In both cases, participants remediated their relationships with the cameras, the subject matter, the researchers, and conceivably themselves, through harnessing the latent agency in being on camera. This remediation—using the camera as an actant in the system to trouble existing relationships and forge new ones—surfaces methodological implications: The camera is not objective, certainly, but rather an agent in the production of video, whose possibilities are more available to participants as they imagine different interlocutors on the viewing end. As researchers—and as viewers—we must reconsider our methods and theories in light of the fact that participants can shape, perform for, and imagine relationships through the camera.

Authors

• Lana Cosic, Vanderbilt University

• Sarah Jaewon Lee, University of Washington