Analysing visual fieldnotes: Looking back on an archive of comic-style fieldnotes

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: What about fieldnotes in comparative and international education research? Approaches, practices and ethical considerations

Proposal

Seeking to bring a participatory visual ethos to all aspects of her doctoral fieldwork (2015-2018), the author produced 248 visual fieldnote entries that were drawn in a comic style, uploaded to a public blog, and shared with participants. The author’s doctoral project explored issues of identity, belonging, and resistance through cellphilms (cellphone + filmmaking) with 11 ethnic minority youth who had grown up and gone to school in Hong Kong. The fieldnote entries addressed a range of topics, including recalling meetings with participants, managing her sense of isolation in the field, and negotiating dissertation writing years after leaving the field and while becoming a new parent. The comic-style of the fieldnotes aimed to be accessible to the study participants as well as to stakeholders, to her doctoral committee, and to her family and friends. In 2015—the year that she was in Hong Kong completing the data collection, and when the majority of the entries were drawn and uploaded—386 individuals visited the fieldnotes blog. These audiences engaged with the images and provided their own feedback and analysis of the drawings and their themes through written comments and in-person conversations. This paper explores two key questions about the analysis of visual fieldnotes:
1. What modes of analysis might be applied to a corpus of comic-style fieldnotes?
2. How might a practice of looking at visual fieldnotes encourage researcher reflexivity?
In this paper, the author analyzes the ways that she visually represented space, Hong Kong, and bodies in her fieldnotes. Drawing on Rose (2012; see also, Dyer 1997), the author examines her fieldnotes by attending to three dimensions of critical visual analysis: technological, compositional, and social. The hand-drawn images, pens, notebooks, and a digital scanner constitute the technological dimension. The compositional dimension speaks to the ways that colour, imagery, lighting, imagery, and themes are captured by the still images. Finally, the social dimension includes the social spaces where the images were produced and interpreted, including schools, public housing buildings, parks, and other places in Hong Kong, as well as how the author engaged reflexive revisiting as analysis over time (Burawoy, 2003). Blunt and Wills (2001) argue that “ideas about vision, visual representation and ‘the gaze’ are inherently spatial, usually implying a distance between the observer and what is being observed and often involving different strategies of bounding or enframing what is seen” (cited in Kindon, 2003, p. 142). Rose’s multidimensional framework helps to diminish the false boundary between the image and the world in which it lives (see also, Clarke, Shears & Yates, 2002). In examining the technological, compositional, and social dimensions of her participatory visual fieldnote entries, the author exposes how she made, remade, and shared meaning of her time in the field through these visual texts. The paper suggests that a critical visual analysis of public fieldnote images shares key information about researcher positionality and ideology, and encourages in-depth reflexivity within the project as a whole.

Author

• Casey Burkholder, University of New Brunswick