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Paper short abstract:

Combining visual gears with joint visual analysis, the ‘Participatory Videography’ lays the basis for present and future focussed ethnographic research, which aims to be ethically responsive to both research participants and scientists in South-North collaborations, working with videographic data.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on an application submitted to the German Research Foundation, which draws on pilot-phase video footage of highly skilled migrants in Dakar and Berlin. We will present first empirical findings on the participants’ initial spatial (dis)orientation in the respective city. We both address palpable restrictions of collaborative visual research, such as funding, mobility, and visual tools but also the ‘Senegalese’ and ‘German’ dialogue on positionalities and their theoretical implications.

Visual ethnographic methods had a long standing history as part of the colonial matrix, exoticising ‘the Other’ and perpetuating who is collecting visual data of whom. Recent scholarly debates in the Global North became more aware of the implicit power imbalances of seeing and the biased regimes that reproduce gender, racist or ableist discrimination (Ahmed 2007).

Yet still, the sociology of knowledge struggles with video-based ethnographies conducted outside of “one’s own culture” (Knoblauch 2021). The authors of this paper argue that their ‘Participatory Videography’ combining First-Person-Perspective-Camera from Visual Anthropology (Lahlou 2011, Pink 2015), and videography (Knoblauch 2021), evades these afformentioned dichotomies. In addition, joint Video Analysis (Knoblauch et al. 2006) and, theoretical-reflexive comparison adress limitations of mutual understanding, invisible or silenced facets of empirical research and consequently the construction of social roles and theories, scientists are informed by. Dialogue as a possibility of co-interpretation is seen as a pivot point to question the epistemological assumptions that ground one’s own interpretations in specific contexts (Baur 2021). This multi-methods approach opens for novel reflections on spatiotemporal concepts such as ‘(dis)orientation’.