Video-reflexive ethnography as potentiation technology: What about investigative quality?

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article has three aims. First, it will set out the ‘potentiating’ premises of video-reflexive ethnography (VRE) and the ways in which VRE potentiates learning through visual feedback as ‘self-irritant’ that invites ‘liminalisation’. Liminalisation invites people to learn by stepping away from their taken-as-given ways of being and saying. Potentiation capitalises on this loosening of identification with what is assumed to be the real, thereby expanding people’s action potential. The article’s second aim is to exemplify what VRE looks like in and as practice. Two case studies provide instances of liminalisation. This leads into the article’s third aim: to reflect on research quality in relation to liminalisation and potentiation. This part of the paper explains that VRE’s quality standard turns on two ‘relational’ indicators that apply to both the researchers’ and the participants’ conducts and experiences: engagement and movement. The article theorises engagement as a measure of researchers’ and participants’ investment in the overall VRE process. Movement is theorised as the pace and degree of liminalisation experienced and potentiation achieved through people’s psychosocial becoming (undone).