Collaborative visual ethnography and breast cancer

• Main Author: Douglass, Christine
• Published: University of Westminster 2015
• Subjects: 616.99
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.675507

The aim of this cross-disciplinary, practice-based PhD was to develop, justify and implement an ethical, collaborative visual research methodology to explore and make visible individual experiences of breast cancer. Nine women, from different ethnic backgrounds, diagnosed with breast cancer nine-36 months before commencement of the study were given video cameras and invited to film their lives. They filmed for an average of nine months and three weeks. The practice component of this research comprised nine individual films. Together with a ten-minute single screen compilation, projected diary extracts and notes from the participants, they formed a gallery exhibition, What if? The work has progressed existing debates and practices in shared visual ethnography and cross-disciplinary visual research. It provides an original contribution to knowledge through the development of a methodology that has: challenged the reliance on the interview and prior identification of themes as research interventions; offered new insights into reflexive theorising and positioning of investigators in research relationships; countered homogenising, reductive narrative frameworks; and contested fixed models of consent. It also adds to the literature and practices exploring alternative platforms for exhibiting polyphonic, durational visual ethnographic material and to discussions on filmmaking as a therapeutic intervention. In investigations into the lives of others diagnosed with illness, the irreducibility of experience, the multiple truths that co-exist, and the impossibility of investigators becoming similarly situated, demand a respectful, unexploitative, collaborative research methodology. This research proposed an approach that meets these aims.