Visual Methodologies (VM - E-Journal)
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Re/formulating Ethical Issues for Visual Research Methods
Get PDFThis paper discusses six categories of key ethical issues that are important to consider when using visual methods in social research. The categories were identified during workshop discussions with researchers working across disciplines and using a range of visual methods. They have been used to inform guidelines for the ethical conduct of research using visual methods. The categories represent both familiar and emerging ethical challenges. They include widely accepted strategies for meeting ethical obligations to ensure participants’ informed consent, to maintain confidentiality, and to design and conduct research that minimises harm. Three further categories represent more novel ethical issues that are particularly prominent in visual methods: managing fuzzy boundaries around the multiple purposes that visual research may serve, addressing questions of authorship and ownership of visual products generated during research, and dealing with representation and audiences when disseminating research findings. In this paper we reflect on the tensions and challenges these issues raise for researchers working with visual methods, and consider potential strategies to address these challenges. By identifying and critiquing ethical issues that are prominent in visual methods, this paper contributes to a growing body of work that aims to ensure the ethical conduct of visual research
Visual Methods in Social Research
Get PDFIt was a pleasure to take up the invitation to review this second edition of Visual Methods in Social Research, as I had gained so much from reading the first edition and looked forward to returning to the updated volume. In the original book, Marcus Banks (2001, p. 7) argued that ‘our initial understandings or readings of images are always pre-scripted’ and he suggested that we ask particular questions about found images, ‘what the image is of, what is its context?, who took it or made it, when and why?, how do other people come to have it, how do they read it, what do they do with it?’. Drawing on Hindu philosophy, Banks encouraged readers to locate this more productive seeing in relation to ‘darshan’; the ability to see and understand multiple points of view and schools of thoughts; and I have carried this philosophy in my own work with visual and creative methodologies (Mannay 2016)
Editorial: Visual methods and ethics: Stories from the field
No full textThis special issue on ethical issues in visual research arose from our collective observation that there is an urgent need for researchers to share and reflect upon stories about the ethical challenges they are facing in their research, including how they have navigated the formal procedural ethics review process and how they have identified and responded to ethical challenges in their research practice. Our approach in this special issue has been to call for tales from the field that raise new questions and highlight concerns within the context of real and ongoing research rather than attempt to derive solutions to ethical problems in an abstract or decontextualized way. The overall collection is therefore one that highlights the importance of good descriptive self-reflexive accounts of ethical and methodological issues, especially in terms of what is useful for other visual researchers and also for members of research ethics boards or committees (REB/REC)
Adding the agentic capacities of visual materials to visual research ethics
Get PDFThe focus of visual research ethics has largely been on the ethical effects of visual research on participants. There is increasing identification of how researchers are ethically affected by visual research. However, there has been no sustained examination into how visual materials themselves have ethical consequences in visual research. In this paper we argue visual research presents with particular ethical challenges because of the agentic capacities of the visual materials themselves. The paper draws on a research project where participants generated two different kinds of visual materials: timeline charts and photos. We show how timeline charts and photos have contrasting imaginative, bodily, memory and synaesthetic capacities. The agentic capacities of the visual materials act in specific ways to co-create a network of relations across the research encounters. This network of relations has the capacity to act in particular ethical ways with serious consequences not just for research participants, but also for researchers. We propose the action of visual materials themselves needs to be added to ethical discussion about visual research. Drawing on the concept of ethical sustainability, we advocate for extending situated ethics and researcher reflexivity to include consideration of the agentic capacities of visual materials themselves
Visualizing Research: Crowd Sourcing Technology for Global Understanding
Get PDFThis research details the results of two pilot projects that explored the use of Image-based research and a new method of collecting visual data online. With visual culture and literacy as the pretext, new understandings of the visual-textual relationship in a global context were studied. Using Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing technology, requests for drawings and video analysis were submitted to a database where members selected and completed them. The results suggest a homogenizing effect on local and cultural interpretations of imagery could be taking place globally and further maintain that Image-based research should be the primary method for investigating and informing visual, media and digital literacies
Visual Embodiment of Psychosis: Ethical Concerns in Performing Difficult Experiences
Get PDFArts-based health research has increased dramatically in recent years. Many academics are collaborating across disciplines including health and social sciences, humanities and the arts. Using artistic modes of research representation allows for a different way of participating and may enhance the likelihood of making an impact (negative or positive) on the audience and, consequently, on artists and researchers. This paper focuses on the concept of ‘dangerous emotional terrain’, used to describe the potential negative impacts of using the arts, in this case dance, in research dissemination. We focus on a seldom-explored area – the impact on artists embodying research results of difficult lived experiences. The potential for harm to performers engaging in arts-based research requires consideration. Actors and other artists and their experiences of depicting suffering and pain, for example, remain relatively unexplored. What are our responsibilities to performers taking on this role? What are the ethical implications of engaging in such work? This paper explores these questions and identifies four strategies to tackle emotional impact: reflexive practice, creation of a safe and supportive environment, address issues of audience, and focus on balance between types of performance, and between work and home
Ethical issues in the use of video observations with people with advanced dementia and their caregivers in nursing home environments
Get PDFThe use of video allows researchers to gather rich, evocative and contextualized data, yet it also opens a space fraught with ethical challenges. In this paper, the authors describe their use of video methods in ethnographic case study research examining the experiences of persons with advanced dementia who reside in nursing homes and are nearing the end-of-life. In this research, video is used to help garner a deeper understanding of the person with advanced dementia’s being-in-the-world as well as the embodied workplace practices of care staff. Drawing upon notions of emplacement and embodiment, we unpack ethical issues that arise from conducting research with a vulnerable population within a complex environment. In addition to discussing general ethical principles such as consent, assent and privacy, we argue that to conduct ethically sound research, the researcher needs a solid understanding of the complex and dynamic nature of the nursing home environment. This is, at once, a communal living setting and a home for the residents, a place of work for a diverse group of care staff, and an organizational structure emplaced in a larger socio-political environment. We shed light on, and discuss potential solutions to, the challenges and complexities of bringing a video camera into the nursing home space where ethical questions arise in ambiguous situations, where relationships shift and the ethical ground reconfigures over time
Poor places, powerful people? Co-producing cultural counter-representations of place.
Get PDFThis paper considers the ethical aspects of co-producing visual representations of communities in the context of economic deprivation, focusing on one case study within a UK-wide research study funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The research explores how the arts and humanities can enable community members to better express aspects of their health and wellbeing to policy makers and service providers, looking in particular at the stigmatising and often shaming practices of representation that have dominated British mass media in recent years. The methodology for the research follows a participatory action research epistemology, whereby researchers work with participants and other stakeholders to co-produce data and artistic outputs. The ethical dimensions of this work are complex and go beyond issues of consent, confidentiality and ownership; although these were strongly present in the research. This paper presents data from focus groups, arts workshops and field notes to illustrate the complexity of working co-productively with visual methods, and the ethical challenges this presents, as well as the need to create ‘safe’ spaces for dialogue and social action