Empathetic Visuality: GoPros and the Video Trace

Abstract

Body-mounted action cameras are increasingly used in social science research to account for and understand mobile experiences of the world. In this chapter, we explore the possibilities such technologies offer us for encountering and analysing aspects of other people’s and our own (as researchers) experiences through ethnographic theory and practice. In doing so, we focus on the notion of the video trace—that is, the idea that such cameras do not so much offer us the possibility to capture the world as it appears in front of the camera lens, but instead record a video trace through the world as created by our movement in specific environmental, sensory and affective configurations. We use this approach to examine what we might learn by making such recordings, and how the possibility of empathetic co-creation of sensory knowledge between researcher, research participants and potential audiences emerges. As such, we do not treat video as a ‘record’ of experience so much as we foreground its capacity to generate new knowledge by constituting a particular trace that enables a process of reflection, discussion and understanding. This process uses the recording as a springboard for knowledge-making rather than treating it as capturing something that already exists.