Transcript Document

Children, video-making and research:
emerging questions about visual
methodologies
Liesbeth de Block and Rebekah Willett
Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media
Institute of Education, University of London
Camcorder cultures
Media technology and everyday creativity
• AHRC-funded project, 2005 - 2008, David
Buckingham and Maria Pini
• domestic use
• learning
• cultures and contexts
• creativity
• Surveys, interviews, case studies
Domestic visuals as cultural objects
and constructions
Richard Chalfen(1987) Snapshot Versions of Life
• Documentation - visual history
• Memory - triggering of the memory, hedonistic
function
• Cultural memberships - display of proper and
expected behaviour
Possibilities home video
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moving image
re-watching
audience
technology
Spoof videos, masculinity and friendships
• 120 spoofs from 68 different producers young white men, only 2 young women
• Humour
• Negotiation: cool achievers
• Play and power (Winnicott)
Children in Communication
about Migration (www.chicam.org)
• EU funded
– 7 partners - 3 years
• Research themes
– education, family, friendship, visual
communication
• Focus: refugee children 10-14
• Media clubs, intranet
• Researchers and media educator
Video as participation
• during research process
– A focus for the negotiation of understanding
between researched and researcher
• before, during, after
– Allows children to guide the research
direction
• BUT
– We set the boundaries: club, themes,
skills/equipment
– Their work comes out of their media
experience
Video as ‘voice’
For participation in the public sphere
– Part of a long tradition of marginalised
voices in documentary and activist media?
• Grierson (1946) ‘the creative treatment
of reality’
– Who is the audience?
– What are their speaking positions?
– What are the confines within which they
can ‘speak’?
What is the video?
• Pink (2004) video as a subjective text made
in collaboration with the researcher
– ‘as a technology that participates in the
negotiation of social relationships’
– ‘video representation’
• children’s productions do not simply ‘speak
for themselves’.
videos
Analysing visuals - accounting for
practices and texts
• Context of production - place, social context,
purpose and motivation,
technology,people/social relationships
• Construction - film grammar, sound, editing,
legibility,presentation
• Content - representation, genre, narrative
• Reception - who, where, how, when, why,