Interdisciplinary challenges in Visual Methodology: understanding data and interpretive act / Dr Marta Rabikowska

1. Betwixt and between:
Exploring the liminal through the
social sciences, arts and humanities
Dr Marta Rabikowska
Interdisciplinary challenges in Visual Methodology:
understanding data and interpretive act

2. Place, Culture and Film: exploring international migrants’
health practices
• Project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, F/07
476/AN, to conduct research on health among
three ethnic groups: Punjabi, Polish and Nigerian
living in London.
• Visual methods: photoelicitation and
documentary film. The film being a composite of
footage from home tours, interviews and
purpose-shot samples of the local environment
• Team: social scientist, sociologist, cultural
studies theoretician, and filmmaker.

3. • The primary study output was designed to be in the form of
a film, its use to be twofold:
• firstly, to promote dialogue among academics, local
communities, local government policy makers and health
professionals and,
• secondly, as an educational tool for health professionals
and academics interested in migrant health issues, as well
as in applying and teaching visual methodology.
• The intention of the film was to open up discussion about
health and migration, rather than bringing analytic closure,
through attention to everyday health practices among
different migrant groups in a specific place.

4. Objectives derived from social science
encounter creative determinants
• What we see does not equal to what ‘is’.
• Social sciences’ underpinning rule: the world
out there is. The filmmaker’s rule: the world
out there is up to me.
• Tension between the consciousness of the
filming process (trying to accommodate the
world of the participants in an audio-visual
language) and the academic consciousness of
the project’s goals.

5. With or without ‘cola nut’, with or
without a ‘family photograph’.

6. Real green or the poetics of green?

7. Fictional choreography or
reconstructed truth?

9. Close up of a prop or the most
representative referent?

12. We interpret reality at all stages
(with the camera or not)
• Camera as a piece of technical equipment has its own requirements, has
its own ‘life’.
• ‘Seeing’ by each team member is differently pre-determined.
• Reality on film is not the reality (of participants), but it suggests the
truthful relation to it.
• The objectives of the project grounded in the social sciences determine
the production and the reception of that relation, while creative decisions
and impacts become neutralised by research methodology.
• Authenticity/truth is not achievable
• Strategic authenticity/truth instead
(Gubrium, Krause & Jernigan, 2014, Sexuality Research and Social Policy; Paul A.Cohen, History in Three Keys: The
Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York, 1997).

13. Paradox or (creative) challenge?
Social scientific objectives and language undergo
‘violence’.
Crinall, K.M. 2009. “The Social Researcher as Artist: Creativity as a Social Science Research Method.” The
International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 3 (11):182-191.
The boundaries of the discipline crumble.
• (e.g.what is the meaning of the shadow of the filmmaker on the fridge?)
The filmmaker and film director imply their own
objectives.
(e.g. light must be good enough for the audience to see)
Film becomes a tool of interpretation of the process
of knowledge production.

14. Film has its own ontological identity
• Following MacDougall (2006)
•
• [By] providing a series of perceptual clues, films construct spaces
analogous to those we experience in everyday life, as we sample
visual and other sensory information and construct seemingly
smooth and complete picture of our surroundings. As in everyday
life, this information is far from complete, and we fill in the gaps
with suppositions. Films create the information and gaps in
stylistically varied ways, and in film viewing this very stylistic
noncomformity, or distinctiveness, acts as a further stimulus to
our creative response. (25)
• MacDougall, D. 2006. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and
the Senses. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

15. Research film and documentary film
Bill Nichols:
documentary film is one of the discourses of
sobriety that include science, economics,
politics, and history discourses that claim to
describe the real, to tell the truth in a creative
mode. It is a creation after all that is exercise
power and change people’s minds or ways of
seeing.
Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 2nd edition. Bloomington, Ind.:
Indiana University Press, 2010.

16. How the problems (challenges) start….
• Creation
• Discourse that claims to describe the real
• Information and gaps
• Stylistic nonconformity and distinctivness
• A further stimulus to our (team and audience)
creative response

17. between
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
T.S.Eliot, The Hollow Men.

18. Liminality in data production and
analysis:
• Filmmaking, directing, editing is based on
‘supposition’ – interpreting on the go at all
stages of the project.
• The shadow of each discipline’s integrity
grows.
• New discipline emerges? What is it?

19. • Can the empirical project, which is to enable
dialogue between health practitioners, policy
makers, educators and participants themselves,
be grounded on the shadow?
- If such project coerces the fixidity of its own
disciplinary objectives and offers an unlimited
potential (of referents and signifiers) for
interpretation, it is not traditional social science
(or science at all), but it is not a creative
documentary either.

20. A betwixt hybrid
• Knowledge emerging from conflict, frustration,
agony, uncertainty, and surprise brings about
unexpected research findings and new research
questions.
• Researcher is a performer interpreting and re-
interpreting the course of research.
• New definitions of knowledge are needed, while
disciplinary borders melt.

21. • To be genuinely interdisciplinary, however,
simply adding–on, superimposing, or including
the creative and the visual in traditional
methodologies is insufficient. The
incorporation of the creative and artistic into
social inquiry requires rethinking the nature
and breadth of the knowledge-base of social
science.
Crinall, K.M. 2009. “The Social Researcher as Artist: Creativity as a Social Science Research Method.” The International Journal of
Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 3 (11):182-191.

22. Research in between and betwixt
• Identity split
• Lack of traditional integrity and support from
peers
• Multifarious vernaculars
• Extra load of work along new encounters
• lack of closure
• Risk of falling into amateurism
• Risk of constant inspiration, fascination, and
desire to explore the unknown.