Visual Anthropology

Here I am, on the right, demonstrating how to hook up audio equipment during one of my ethnographic videography classes at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia in 2006 and on the left with the students who participated in my videography class in Hanoi, Vietnam December, 2006.

Over the last five years I have been incorporating videography into my ethnographic and community-based research projects at the Hispanic Health Projects. In the summer of 2003 I attended the International Film and Video Workshops at Rockport College in Maine and studied filmmaking with some wonderfully talented visual artists. Subsequently, I twice assisted the documentary filmmaker, Bill Megalos, teaching the Workshops documentary filmmaking class in Oaxaca, Mexico. As a cultural anthropologist, with many years of experience living and working in Mexico and other countries, videography has given me a new way to communicate my ideas and research findings, it has also inspired me to broaden my notions of ethnographic research methods to including visual data gathering and analysis. I teach Visual Anthropology to undergraduate and graduate students at Idaho State University; participants from my classes screen their video ethnographies at our annual SpudDance film festival.

I spent the last two summers as a visiting academic at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia where I was in residence teaching ethnographic videography to anthropologists from Australia, New Zealand, East Timor and SE Asia. I was also invited to spent a couple weeks in Hanoi doing a videography training course for health professionals in December 2006. Videography is an important tool for ethnographers and other social science researchers.

During the summers of 05 and 06 I attended the National Science Foundation short courses on systematic qualitative data analysis. I am currently designing a course on “Systematic Techniques for Gathering and Analyzing Visual Data” that I will be offering with my colleague, Jerome Crowder, PhD (University of Houston) for the NSF-SCRM courses during August of 2008. Video recordings provide an exceptional way to capture qualitative data for use in research. We will us a hands-on approach and participants will become familiar with professional video cameras and audio equipment. Participants will work in small groups filming local artisans in the coastal town of Beaufort, N.C. The video footage will be downloaded into computers for coding and analysis. The class will prepare participants to collect anthropological data using state of the art video recording equipment and to analyze their data using multi-dimensional, non-linear digital editing/analysis software.