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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