Bearing Witness: Using Video Ethnography to Map Embodied Geographies of Home

Abstract

ABSTRACT Bearing witness through video ethnography is a generative practice for revealing nuanced elements of non-verbal sociocultural practices that otherwise remain hidden in interview-based research methods. I share how I used this methodology to highlight the sociocultural practices and sensory worlds that constitute the assemblage forming the everyday embodied geographies of home for post-1975 Vietnamese refugee women. Intervening in discourses that portray refugee women as victims of their circumstance, I center Vietnamese refugee women’s subjecthood to show how they exercise agency and make home in the face of the on-going sociospatial displacements that punctuate their everyday lives after resettlement.