Walking with video is a phenomenological research method that entails walking with and recording participants as they experience, talk, and show their material, immaterial, and social environments. In Pink’s case, she walked with her participants around a community garden on several occasions. She also video-recorded their walk as her participants guided her through the site and explained to her their involvement and experiences in the garden project. Her participants’ experiences of the place are socially negotiated, and yet the interactions and behaviours are individualised and personal.
Pink’s participants showed and told her about the community garden as they experienced it together. It gave Pink the opportunity to use her own sensory embodied experience, for example walking in the rain on wet grass or feeling the texture of brickweave path, to empathise with her participants’ experiences. With “place” being the central concept, the research would be able to “sensing place, placing senses, sensorially making place and making sense of place” (p.243). The “place” is no longer an imagined place that only exists on paper or in the verbal description by the participants, as in an interview, but a physical environment in which memories and meanings were already invested by the researcher.
Compared to interview, “walking with video” provides the sensory understanding of another’s experiences. It also produces place in any one moment in time and allows an empathetic interpretation of an emplaced experience. Think of interview as the childhood classroom activity of “show and tell”, walking with video would be instead of your classmate tells a story of an object in the classroom setting, go with the classmate to where the story took place, walk alongside him/her as the classmate tells how the story happened, record it on tape, then try and understand why he/she chose this object for the show and tell. Although according to Pink, sometimes due to limitations in cultural knowledge, you might not understand his/her choices.
Pink’s participants showed and told her about the community garden as they experienced it together. It gave Pink the opportunity to use her own sensory embodied experience, for example walking in the rain on wet grass or feeling the texture of brickweave path, to empathise with her participants’ experiences. With “place” being the central concept, the research would be able to “sensing place, placing senses, sensorially making place and making sense of place” (p.243). The “place” is no longer an imagined place that only exists on paper or in the verbal description by the participants, as in an interview, but a physical environment in which memories and meanings were already invested by the researcher.
Compared to interview, “walking with video” provides the sensory understanding of another’s experiences. It also produces place in any one moment in time and allows an empathetic interpretation of an emplaced experience. Think of interview as the childhood classroom activity of “show and tell”, walking with video would be instead of your classmate tells a story of an object in the classroom setting, go with the classmate to where the story took place, walk alongside him/her as the classmate tells how the story happened, record it on tape, then try and understand why he/she chose this object for the show and tell. Although according to Pink, sometimes due to limitations in cultural knowledge, you might not understand his/her choices.
Jingyu,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate how you connected the idea of sensory understanding with in-class 'show and tell'. That helped me to understand the differences between the methods used by Pink and interview strategies. Are there any issues you found with this style of conducting research and analyzing the data aside from cultural limitations? Were the participants asked questions throughout the process to integrate narrative and explanations of the experience, or was the video recording the only form of data collection? In your mention of cultural limitations, did Pink describe the cultural background of her participants? Would have a similar socio-cultural group help or hinder this type of research?
This sounds like an interesting article and I am looking forward to reading it.
Hi JingYu,
ReplyDeleteThe walking and recording method seem to be a quite interesting sensory approach. The recording represents the visual and sight sensors reflecting what the participants see from their perspectives. Following on Sarah’s comment, I thing one of the shortcomings of this approach would be not tailored to participants who are not comfortable with camera. This process may be ‘intimidating’ if participants don’t feel comfortable in having themselves recorded or they are nervous to be on camera which may impact their behaviour or actions in front of the camera. As a result, the quality and accuracy of the data may be compromised.