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Negotiating gendered subjectivities in mobile video ethnography

Katrina Brown1 & Rachel Dilley2

Abstract

Mobile video-based ethnographic methods are increasingly being used within the discipline of

geography, often as part of endeavours to engage better with the embodied, emotional and

corporeal aspects of everyday spatial practices, social relations and encounters (e.g. Laurier,

2004; Brown et al. 2008; Spinney, 2009; Lorimer, 2010). Accordingly, this approach is held to

show promise in addressing a number of concerns central to feminist geographical

scholarship, not least in finding alternatives to dominant, patriarchal, detached and

disembodying ways of seeing; for example, as a move towards seeing from below rather thanseeing everything from nowhere (Haraway, 1991, 189). In this paper, we consider critically

how this promise is realised in research practice, looking in particular at the kinds of

subjectivities we are enabling and disenabling in generating and audiencing images usingmobile video ethnographic techniques, and the power relations thus reinforced or subverted.

Drawing on our recent exploration of practices of outdoor activity and adventure sports using

these techniques, we focus specifically on how we might be performing and making

subjectivities visible in gendered ways. Particular attention is given to how moving images

and research practices of filming and viewing are positioned in relation to those of established

and emergent visual cultures associated with these outdoor activities and video technologies.

Our aims are to identify some of the ways in which this approach can be empowering or

marginalising, illustrate the allied difficulties and responsibilities of seeing from below, andthus suggest lessons for greater ethical reflexivity in the future use of mobile video

ethnography.

References

Brown KM Dilley R & Marshall K 2008 Using a head-mounted video camera to understand social worlds and experiences SociologicalResearch Online 13 6 http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/6/1.html

Laurier E 2004 Doing Office Work on the Motorway, Theory, Culture & Society, 21(4/5), 261-277

Spinney J 2009 Cycling the city: movement, meaning and method Geography Compass 3 2 817-835

Lorimer J 2010 Moving image methodologies for more-than-human geographies Cultural Geographies, 17, 237-258

1 James Hutton Institute, Craigiebuckler, Aberdeen, AB15 8QH,k.brown@macaulay.ac.uk

2 University of Sheffield, Elmfield, Northumberland Road, Sheffield, S10 2TU,r.e.dilley@sheffield.ac.uk

mailto:k.brown@macaulay.ac.ukmailto:k.brown@macaulay.ac.ukmailto:k.brown@macaulay.ac.ukmailto:r.e.dilley@sheffield.ac.ukmailto:r.e.dilley@sheffield.ac.ukmailto:r.e.dilley@sheffield.ac.ukmailto:r.e.dilley@sheffield.ac.ukmailto:k.brown@macaulay.ac.uk