Interaction Analysis in Conversation with a Radical Black Politics of Visuality

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

Abstract

Multiple threads of Interaction Analysis (IA) scholarship articulate how video-analytic methods are always theory-laden—video as theory (Hall, 2000), transcription as theory (Ochs, 1979), uneven dynamics of participant observation (Erickson, 2006), relations with camera (Vossoughi & Escudé, 2016), settler-colonial ontologies (Krishnamoorthy et al., 2021)—pathways that our group elaborates in the aforementioned projects. Contributing to this conversation, I consider a specific use case of interaction analysis, involving recorded images and videos of Black people’s suffering—including but not limited to: racial microaggressions, constrained learning opportunities, quotidian bureaucratic practices of oppression, physical violence—to highlight how analysts’ practices of viewing are also laden with implicit racial theories. Specifically, how untroubled empirical assumptions of technorationality obscure racial politics embedded within the ecology of image recording and circulation (Benjamin, 2019). These assumptions maintain settler-colonial logics, obscuring ongoing struggles of Black communities for self-determination.

Locating my positionality as a Black femme whose politics are elaborated through Black feminist thought (Collins, 2022), I consider interaction analysis practices in conversation with Black communities’ projects of self-determination. By Black communities’ self-definition, I mean the individual and collective practices of group empowerment, connected to our myriad political and intellectual genealogies that challenge intersectional oppressions (Okello, 2018). I draw attention to how Black activists connect to ongoing struggles for self-determination through movements (such as #BlackLivesMatter and #sayhername) challenging the presumed neutrality of viewing material depicting Black people’s suffering. Black communities’ struggles for self-determination are contained within practices such as refusing to engage with media that perpetuate violence and instead sharing the names of individuals. Recognizing these practices as part of ongoing struggles for Black communities’ self-determination makes analytically mobile myriad modalities of radical Black knowledge-making (Robinson, 2000), including oral traditions, systemic critiques of oppression, and the conceptualization of well-being as distributed and collective (Wu et al., 2023).

Said bluntly, norms of IA are not absent from racial politics. Moving in solidarity with Black peoples’ projects of self-definition challenges methodological norms such as repeated viewing and the political limitations of treating minimally edited clips as analytically viable (Derry et al., 2010) by locating these practices within a sociohistorical context where viewing violence of Black people served to maintain racial domination through terror (Hartman, 2007).

My argument is not to deny the crucial utility of IA for social explanation and description: scholarship which troubles assumptions of neutrality of STEM learning (e.g., Sengupta-Irving et al., 2020; Philip et al., 2018) has been generative for locating the interactional scale as a politically viable site for contesting and renegotiating dynamics. Instead, I aim to draw on Black intellectual genealogies to highlight how video analyses can function as insular inquiries into damage (Tuck, 2009; Táíwò, 2022) and propose a radical shift in research subject-subject relations (e.g., Bang & Vossoughi, 2016): where research is accountable to struggles of Black communities for self-determination. Ultimately, engaging with Black communities’ ongoing struggles for self-determination offers generative alternatives for robust equity- and justice-oriented educational research to interaction analysis and video-analytic methodologies.

Author

• Natalie Annabelle Rae, Pennsylvania State University