SEMINAR IN VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY
STANTON WORTHAM – SPRING 2013
This course was an attempt to engage the methodological and theoretical implications of capturing data and crafting social scientific accounts/narratives in images and sounds. Students were required to put theory into practice by producing theoretically sophisticated audiovisual projects. This seminar was driven by a few guiding questions/concerns:
This course was an attempt to engage the methodological and theoretical implications of capturing data and crafting social scientific accounts/narratives in images and sounds. Students were required to put theory into practice by producing theoretically sophisticated audiovisual projects. This seminar was driven by a few guiding questions/concerns:
- What can film/video bring to the qualitatively observational social sciences?
- How do we theorize with film? With images? With sound?
- How do the use of multimodal methods/film, change the research process, or even the conception of research itself?
- What problems arise from the deployment of such technologies as mechanisms for seeing/representing socio-cultural data? Where do historically established and prevailing norms and practices of filmmaking and cinematic communication converge and diverge from the needs of academic presentation?
- What kinds of insight can be gained by critically examining seemingly self-evidential visual/indexical “facts”?
