Video methods beyond representation: Experimenting with multimodal, sensuous, affective intensities in the 21st century

Abstract

I received Charlotte Bates’s kind request to write the conclusion to this fine and timely collection of essays as Jonathan Taggart and I were en route back home after a week spent filming and doing fieldwork on the East Coast of Canada. I hesitated to agree. Though I had been working with Jonathan for over two years on the making of an extensive video documentary production (see chapter 10, this volume) I had always held reservations about the academic establishment of both ethnographic film and video-based data collection methods. In my mind video has always had an enormous potential to affect its audiences—a potential to inform, educate, entertain, transform, and stimulate—but the people least qualified to actualize that potential, I had long been convinced, were academics. So I nervously agreed to write this chapter, presaging that it would inevitably end up being a polemical one focused on the shortcomings of video methods as currently practiced and the still largely unfulfilled potential of video-based scholarship.