{"id":9324,"date":"2016-09-14T23:09:18","date_gmt":"2016-09-15T06:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dminlgp.com\/?p=9324"},"modified":"2016-09-14T23:09:18","modified_gmt":"2016-09-15T06:09:18","slug":"visual-ethnography-in-the-real-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/visual-ethnography-in-the-real-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Visual Ethnography in the Real World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"View<\/a><\/p>\n

My daughter, Grace, is an incredible visual ethnographer and she does not even know it. I imagine it is that way with many of her generation. As she goes through life, she documents the people and experiences in a way that offers a lens that not only invites others into the experience, but also allows for individual interpretations.<\/p>\n

In her book, Doing Visual Ethnography<\/em>, Sarah Pink defines ethnography as, \u201ca methodology\u2026an approach to experiencing, interpreting and representing experience, culture, society and material and sensory environments that informs and is informed by sets of different disciplinary agendas and theoretical principles\u201d (34). If not for my daughter, I would likely have responded to this definition (and perhaps much of Pink\u2019s book) with a simple, \u201cHuh?\u201d Instead, her words evoke the way in which Grace manages to weave her artistic viewpoint together with her love of science and passion for people into an ongoing documentary of everything she encounters.<\/p>\n

When I started this book, I did not really understand the term “ethnography.” Dictionary.com defines it as “a branch of anthropology dealing with the scientific description of individual cultures.” Pink notes, \u201cI understand ethnography as a process of creating and representing knowledge or ways of knowing that are based on ethnographers\u2019 own experiences and the ways these intersect with the persons, places and things encountered during that process\u201d (35). Grace provided me with a living example of this process during her recent hospitalization. Throughout this traumatic event, Grace visually documented not only her own angst and pain (mostly through Snapchat selfies), but also the development of her relationship with the different doctors, nurses, and even housekeeping staff as she caught them in candid moments and staged group pictures. In the visual documentation, one can see the way the doctors came to enjoy coming to see her each day, something many of them told her when she was finally released. She also showed, from a patient\u2019s perspective, the progression from being trapped in a hospital bed, to being allowed to venture around the hospital, to finally being released. Interspersed with these representations of the personal aspect are the video and textual documentation of the progress of her diagnoses and treatment. Screenshots of the diagnoses and proposed medications from the web are chronicled along with pictures of the wounds and side effects of her medications. My particular favorites are the memes she either found on the web or created herself to describe treatments and\/or personnel she encountered. Today, when she was once again telling the story to a new medical professional at a follow-up appointment, she used many of these images to show not only the progress of her disease and wounds, but also the progress of her own fear and frustration and the great care she received. When we were done, I told her she should write a book about the process and provide her visual ethnography as a way of explaining the things that words cannot express.<\/p>\n

The entire time I was reading Pink\u2019s book, the playground taunt, \u201cTake a picture, it lasts longer!\u201d played over and over in my head. Pink makes a compelling argument for the use of visual ethnography as a methodology for providing a necessary dimension to research to document and to evoke the intangible (197-8). Well-written words can, of course, evoke emotion and provide documentation, but there is something unique about images that takes it to another level. I was particularly struck by this as Pink discussed the collaboration required in such visual ethnographies as documentary filmmaking and other video research (198). Even a personal ethnography such as the one Grace inadvertently produced cannot be done without collaboration because most of us do not live an isolated existence.<\/p>\n

Because of the nature of Grace\u2019s medical issues, I am not going to post pictures from this particular journey (I don\u2019t know you all well enough to know how squeamish you are), but I am posting a few pictures below to convey how she documents her deep love for, and interaction with dogs. Enjoy.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160826_235443\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Screenshot_2016-06-16-15-00-46<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Snapchat-5864093311037239624\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\"Harley<\/a><\/p>\n

Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography<\/em>, (London: SAGE Publications, 2013).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My daughter, Grace, is an incredible visual ethnographer and she does not even know it. I imagine it is that way with many of her generation. As she goes through life, she documents the people and experiences in a way that offers a lens that not only invites others into the experience, but also allows […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[493],"class_list":["post-9324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-pink-doingvisualethnography","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9324\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}