Producing curious affects: visual methodology as an affecting and conflictual wunderkammer

Abstract

Digital video cameras, smartphones, internet and iPads are increasingly used as visual research methods with the purpose of creating an affective corpus of data. Such visual methods are often combined with interviews or observations. Not only are visual methods part of the used research methods, the visual products are used as requisites in interviews when interviewees are watching the recordings and share their reflections on these. The purpose of this article is to critically interrogate how such research apparatus, on the one hand, privilege a visual sense and, on the other hand, how the visual may turn into a multisensory knowledge situation, in which tense situations, un/expected and perhaps conflicting senses and un/comfortable affects are evoked. The article takes its point of departure in our analysis of a research apparatus we invented and used in the research project Schooling identities. In this project, 60 pupil review conversations with 13–15-year-old pupils were videotaped with the purpose of exploring the management of self-management. In 20 follow-up interviews with the pupils, the videos were played on an old television and used as memory triggers and initiators of reflection upon the affective experience of their own pupils’ review conversation. We argue that methods can be analytically scrutinised as affective “wunderkammers”, in which different realities are juxtaposed. In so doing, our ways of experiencing research and processes of subjectification are affected and complicated. We interrogate the intensification of this “wunderkammer” and the particularity of it, when a television is part of the apparatus. As Lisa Blackman reminds us, television may be a technology of intimacy, a medium of telepresence which makes certain mental touch and affective transfer processes such as empathy and suggestion possible. During the television-watching, the peer-review conversations were not only represented or memorised but the very experience of the conversation, the people and the tasks involved were revitalised. In the interviews, former lived reality, videotaped reality and presence were conflated. These moments of a new reality affected both pupils and ourselves as researchers intensely. The television-initiated loops of reflection worked as an affective and inventive trigger creating an intense situation. It may also affect the everyday life of school.

Keywords:

• affective methodologies
• research apparatus
• wunderkammer
• performative technologies
• visual methodologies

Acknowledgements

Parts of this text have in a different form been published in a Danish anthology on conflicts (Staunæs & Kofoed, 2014a) and in a Norwegian anthology on methods (Staunæs & Kofoed, 2014b). The article has been rewritten and reorganised according to the anonymous reviews and an international audience.