Health geography and the 'performative' turn: making space for the audio-visual in ethnographic health research

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect on the added value of video in ethnographic research that seeks to understand peoples' lived experiences of health and place. Of particular interest is the potential for video to elicit the embodied, multisensory and relational nature of people's place experiences that are the focus of much recent health geography research. We draw on our experiences of using video in an ethnographic study that sought to explore the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities engaged in nature based (or 'green care') therapeutic interventions for health and wellbeing. We argue that video has the potential to capture aspects of people's wellbeing experiences that may be lost using other methods, such as observational field noting. Consideration is also given to how researchers using video methods should seek to (re)present people's wellbeing experiences, as well as the practical and ethical challenges that this approach has for those working in the field of health geography.

Postqualitative geographies

“…These calls resonate strongly with postqualitative arguments to re‐think methods in the light of process‐oriented ontologies. Of course, performative approaches (Dewsbury, 2010; Kaley et al., 2019; Nash, 2000), non‐representational methodologies (Anderson & Harrison, 2010; Thrift, 2008; Vannini, 2015), hybrid/neo‐vitalist geographies (Anderson & Wylie, 2009; Gandy & Jasper, 2017; Whatmore, 2002), and arts/practice‐based methods (Barry, 2016, 2017a; Boyd & Edwardes, 2019; Hawkins, 2014; Hawkins & Straughan, 2015) have been gathering momentum in human geography for decades now, much of it propelled by the ontological insights to which postqualitative inquiry adheres. These developments within geography will not be rehearsed in this section, rather, two more recent advancements—postphenomenological and posthumanist geographies—will be closely examined with a view to teasing out their implications for a possible postqualitative human geography.…”

Bios and arrows: On time in health geographies

“…In contrast, and as counter to, commercial uses of affect by the new capitalism, these arts‐based approaches use affect in informative educative ways, with health and wellbeing as motivations rather than profit. (vi) Hi‐technologies such as GPS trackers, body/street/drone cameras, electronic timers, pedometers and various bio and other sensors, which provide multiple registers of bodies and materialities in space and time (e.g., Doherty et al., 2014; Kaley et al., 2019; Osborne & Jones, 2017; Spinney, 2015). This is to make use the technological products and tools of the new capitalism, turning them back at it, with non‐profit health ends in mind.…”

‘Never mind the bullocks’: animating the go-along interview through creative nonfiction

“…Recent years have seen growing interest in the use of mobile methods to attend to the fleeting, more-than-human relational encounters that co-constitute people's everyday experiences of health and wellbeing in and through place (Clark 2017;Thompson and Reynolds 2019). From video ethnographies and 'listening' walks to walk/drive/swim-along interviews (Finlay and Bowman 2017;Gallagher and Prior 2017;Denton and Aranda 2019;Kaley, Hatton, and Milligan 2019), such methods are increasingly celebrated for allowing researchers 'to witness an array of embodied and emotional practices as they are experienced and performed by those involved' (Anderson and Jones 2009, 299). Go-along interviews are an approach to qualitative fieldwork in which research participants literally walk (or drive, swim, wheel, kayak and so forth) the researcher through their place experiences (Kusenbach 2003;Parent 2016).…”

“…In doing so, they omit many of the non-verbal, embodied, gestural aspects of communication (Macpherson et al 2016) and the diverse more-than-human presences that flow in and out of the interview frame en route. While walking with a video camera -and sharing visual, sonic and kinaesthetic cinematic edits -may help to enrich these efforts (Spinney 2011;Kaley, Hatton, and Milligan 2019), such movement has its own unique rhythms that are 'distinct from the act of walking without a video camera' (Vannini and Vannini 2017, 184). The use of video, therefore, may not be appropriate with all participants or in all settings.…”