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Introduction

Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, p. 291) advocate presenting one’s research as a process of exposure: ‘… in which you expose yourself, you take risks’; a process of making public ‘muddled, cloudy’ thinking in all ‘its fermenting confusion’ (original emphasis). Yet, too often, they argue, the brush strokes – ‘the touching and retouching’ – are rendered indiscernible with the research revealed only in its ‘finished state’. (p. 219, original emphasis) (Sumsion in press)

In this chapter, we continue our efforts to render visible the uncertainties, risks and confusions that have been such a large part of the Infants’ Lives in Childcare project (Sumsion et al. 2008–11). The project aims to investigate the experiences of very young children (aged up to approximately 18 months) in Australian early childhood settings – from the ‘perspectives’ of the infants themselves. Like Agbenyega (Chap. 9, this volume, pp. 153–168), and following Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), we believe in the importance of ‘reflexivity … and critical mindfulness’ concerning the social worlds that we, as researchers, ‘conjure up’ in our research. Reflexivity, in the sense we are using it here, means cultivating the capacity ‘to stand back from “the game”’ (Crossley 1999, p. 451) and the immediacy of the challenges of the research. Conversely mindfulness, as we use it, refers to being alert to and fully experiencing or ‘living’ those challenges – metacognitively, corporeally and ethically – in the moments they are encountered (Bishop et al. 2004; Elwick et al. in press-a). Being critically reflexive and mindful requires us to interrogate our epistemological and ontological assumptions, the theoretical and methodological resources that we employ, the practices in which we engage and the meanings that we assign. It involves looking beneath the surface, going beyond the commonly accepted, being wary of theoretical and methodological fads and attending to power relations and their effects. It also means recognising that our desires to formulate revolutionary ways of seeing (Agbenyega, Chap. 9, this volume) may blind us to the limitations of those ways of seeing and lead us, inadvertently, to reproduce the social, theoretical and methodological status quo and in doing so possibly exacerbate the inequities that we may have set out to address. We are committed, as a research team and individually, to becoming critically reflexive and mindful in all aspects of our research and to advocating for critical reflexivity and mindfulness in all research concerning young children.

Our specific purpose in this chapter is to offer a case study of critical reflexivity concerning our use of ‘baby cam’ (our term for small head-mounted cameras worn by infants) in the Infants’ Lives in Childcare project. In particular, we consider the extent to which baby cam, as an example of an innovative technology for visual research, might be considered a participatory approach to researching with infants. We focus, too, on the insights it enables and/or constrains and the ethical dilemmas it can create.

The chapter proceeds in three moves. First, we contextualise our discussion by briefly outlining the Infants’ Lives in Childcare project. Next, we introduce Rose’s (2012) framework for critically examining visual methods and, inspired by Rose’s framework, the heuristic device which we subsequently developed to scaffold our reflections about our use of baby cam. We then use this device to discuss some of the challenges generated by baby cam in each of Roses’ three ‘sites’: the production of the image, the image itself and ‘audience’ reaction to the image. To convey a sense of the wide-ranging and complex issues that perplex and trouble us and continue to exercise our conceptual, methodological and ethical imaginations, we present our discussion in the form of a readers’ theatre script.

The Infants’ Lives in Childcare Project

The Infants’ Lives in Childcare project set out to investigate infants’ experiences in Australian centre-based and home-based early childhood education and care settings, with the hopeful and ambitious intent of developing ways of gaining insights into the ‘perspectives’ of the infants. A total of 14 settings (11 family day-care homes and 3 long day-care centres) in regional and rural New South Wales and VictoriaFootnote 1 have participated in the project. As explained in more detail elsewhere (Goodfellow et al. 2011; Press et al. 2011; Sumsion et al. 2011), the project design has been informed by Clark and Moss’s (2001) Mosaic approach that involves ‘the bringing together of different pieces or perspectives in order to create an image of children’s worlds’ (Clark 2005, p. 31). We are crafting our mosaic from data from various combinations of written observational records, conversational interviews eliciting educators’ and parents’ perspectives, standardised measures and visual records (Goodfellow et al. 2011) for 36 ‘focus’ infants to date, within the group context of their early childhood setting, and interpreted through multiple, diverse and continually shifting theoretical perspectives (Sumsion in press). Our visual records consist primarily of digital video data, mostly generated through tripod-mounted and hand-held cameras, but with a small amount of footage from a baby cam mounted on an infant’s hat or headband. Although baby cam constitutes a very minor part of the project, it has attracted a disproportionate amount of attention. For that reason, we have made it the focus of this case study. As a scaffold for our reflections, we now turn to the framework proposed by Rose for exploring visual methods.

Rose’s Framework for Exploring Visual Methods

As Rose (2012) notes, visual images can be seductive and powerful. Therefore, along with the methods used to produce them, they warrant careful and critical examination. Indeed, our experience suggests that even the prospect of seeing the world through infants’ eyes via baby cam has wide, and possibly a kind of voyeuristicFootnote 2 or vicarious appeal, perhaps even reflecting a nostalgic desire to recapture lost memories of infancy. Such seductiveness reinforces the need for critical reflexivity on the part of researchers seeking to seize opportunities arising from advances in visual technologies. To support critical reflexivity, Rose (p. 19) proposes an analytical framework based around three ‘sites’ where meanings of images are constructed. She refers to ‘the site of production, which is where an image is made; the site of the image itself, which is its visual content; and the site where the image encounters its spectators or users … [or] its audiencing’ (original emphases). These sites, Rose emphasises, are interconnected, not discrete.

Moreover, within and across each site, Rose (2012) suggests, it is useful to think of three intersecting aspects or ‘modalities’: the technological, the compositional and the social. By technological, Rose means ‘any form of apparatus designed either to be looked at or to enhance natural vision’ (Mirzoeff 1999, p. 1, cited in Rose 2012, p. 20). By compositional, she means the material qualities of an image, such as its content and spatial organisation, while ‘social’ is her shorthand way of referring to broader social, political and/or economic ‘relations, institutions and practices’ surrounding an image and mediating how it is ‘seen and used’ (p. 20). Rose contends that many of the theoretical, methodological and ethical tensions about visual research methods reflect disputes about the relative importance of these sites and modalities – and, we would add, their consequent implications.

We have adapted Rose’s framework for use in the Infants’ Lives in Childcare project by adding to and refining questions that she suggests may offer a useful starting point for researchers using visual methods. In the remainder of this chapter, we use our adaptation (see Table 10.1) as a heuristic device for critically reflecting on our use of baby cam as a part of our suite of devices and approaches in our admittedly contestable goal of trying to ‘access’ infants’ perspectives and on the conceptual, methodological and ethical issues and implications that have arisen (Bradley et al. 2012; Elwick et al. in press-b). Influenced also by Pink (2007), we have tried to be alert to the interconnectivity between researchers and research participants, the visual research practices and technologies taken up and the images produced and their positioning in the specific socio-political-cultural contexts in which they are embedded. In the following section, we discuss some of the challenges we are encountering.

Table 10.1 A scaffold for reflections about visual images
Full size table

We link part of our discussion to a sequence of photographic ‘stills’ taken from synchronised video footage from a hand-held camera and baby cam footage taken by Tina (3rd author) in a family day-care home (Table 10.2) and shown simultaneously on a split screen using Studiocode™ software.Footnote 3

Table 10.2 Contrasting views: of the infant/researcher/camera/educator
Full size table

The sequence features Peter who, at the time of filming, attended family day care 3 days a week and had been with Cheryl, his educator, since he was 8 weeks old. He was 9 months old when this footage was taken and on that particular day there were four other children at FDC aged between 2.9 and 4.1 years. This footage was captured by Tina on her ninth visit to the home over a period of 5 weeks. Her field notes indicate that:

The children had been playing outside for much of the morning on this pleasant late winter day before coming inside at 12.00 for lunch. Peter sat in a high chair, slightly removed from the older children who sat at a low children’s table and chairs, to Peter’s left. The kitchen area from which the educator retrieved the children’s lunch things was to Peter’s right. During the session Peter fed himself finger food and attempted to drink water from a cup independently. Cheryl also spoon-fed Peter and helped him to drink from the cup. Peter had worn baby cam on two previous visits. On this occasion, he wore the baby cam for around 5 minutes before he reached up and tugged at it, at which point I immediately helped him to remove the camera. (24/08/10: VSS240810-9-TS)

We have selected this footage because of its ‘ordinariness’; it captures an uneventful interaction between Peter and Cheryl in the daily routine of life in the family day-care setting, an interaction of the kind they would have shared many times previously. It is because of this ordinariness that the juxtaposed stills from synchronised baby cam footage and hand-held camera footage are able to render this familiar interaction strange.

In the next section we draw on our reflections on our use of baby cam, scaffolded by questions from our adaptation of Rose’s (2012) framework, to construct a script for a readers’ theatre. By readers’ theatre, we mean a staged presentation of thematically linked segments of text derived from several sources. Staging is simple, involving minimal props, with the performers reading from the script (Donmoyer and Yennie-Donmoyer 1995; Slade 2012).

Baby Cam: A Readers’ Theatre (Script) in Three Acts

We decided to use readers’ theatre – for us, an experimental form of presentation – because it evokes the inherently dialogic nature of our critical reflexivity. Accordingly, we focus on issues that have been, and continue to be, especially salient for us throughout the 4 years (at the time of writing) that we have been engaged in this project. We want to emphasise, however, that our intent is not confessional. Rather, like Johansson and White (2011), we seek to provoke discussion about ethical and efficacious ways in which researchers might gain insight into infants’ experiences over and beyond what has generally been possible through more traditional methods.

The readers’ theatre script that follows is constructed primarily from excerpts from email discussions in which we reflect on our use of baby cam and the opportunities for participatory research that it has opened up and constrained. We have also drawn on lines of thinking prompted by our experience of baby cam that we are pursuing in other writing about the project, as well as our responses to earlier drafts of the script. The excerpts selected portray key themes that continually resurface for us. They are arranged into three Acts, each loosely focused on one of Rose’s three ‘sites’ and containing several scenes. We have cast ourselves as the readers and assumed our ‘real life’ roles in the Infants’ Lives in Childcare project:

  • Jennifer: Project leader

  • Ben: Chief investigator

  • Tina: Doctoral researcher (formerly a research assistant and, in that role, charged with locating a camera suitable for use as a baby cam)

  • Sheena: Doctoral researcher

The script begins with a prologue that explains the genesis of baby cam.

Prologue

Mid-November and an Antipodean early summer day. Struggling desperately to shape our ideas into a competitive research proposal. Summer holidays loom, but so does the Australian Research Council’s submission deadline. Concentration flags. Summer … cricket … the drone of cricketFootnote 4 commentators … gripping action replays from a camera secured to the wicket – a so-called stump-cam that provides close up views of action that would otherwise be missed. A stump-cam? How about a baby cam?Footnote 5 That could be just the ‘wow factor’ we need!

Act 1: The Site of Production of Baby Cam Images

Author’s Notes

Rose (2012) reminds us that the technologies we use in producing images determine the form of those images and also, to a large extent, contribute to their meanings and effects. As we have explained elsewhere (Sumsion et al. 2011), locating appropriate technology from which to fashion a workable baby cam required significant and time-consuming detective work and problem solving. So why did we persevere? Was it worth it? Who has gained and who, or what, might have been compromised? Such questions invite many responses. We begin by focusing on technical aspects (Scene 1) but slide quickly into ethical issues of assent, dissent and participation (Scenes 2 and 3).

Scene 1: Technical Logistics

Tina::

The technology is not quite right yet. It is still too cumbersome. Our choice of camera has been constrained by so many factors: safety for the infant (no wireless cameras as they may emit dangerous radio frequencies in close proximity to the infants’ head); durability (in case it ended up being dropped on the ground or in water), quality of image produced, reliability of camera; what size camera we could reasonably hope an infant might be able to wear …

Sheena::

Baby cam WAS technically difficult to use at times, particularly early on. I am thinking of all the times Sandi wore the camera, only to find that the footage hadn’t worked for some reason or other.

Tina::

Finding a way for the infant to wear the camera so that we got the best approximation of their vision was tricky, particularly as we ended up using a camera that was worn on the side of the head – was the camera pointing in the right direction? Was it angled too high/too low/was it upside down?! Sometimes it would slip down if the infant was moving around a lot, such as on the see-saw. In the end, it was a compromise between something that was reasonably comfortable for the infant to wear, that was quick and easy to put on and that would give us a reasonably accurate representation of the infants’ visual perspective.

I think it may have greater potential in the future as smaller devices become available that are easier to fit and less noticeable for the infant who is wearing it and for the people around the infants. I didn’t use it as much as I could have because it often seemed like an imposition, particularly if the infant appeared to be tired or just not having a good day.

Scene 2: Assent/Dissent

Jennifer::

That’s the crux isn’t it … the issue of assent/dissent.

Tina::

The infants were quite capable of tugging at or removing the camera if they didn’t want to wear it and often did so. That enabled them some control over the situation and an opportunity to dissent.

There were varying responses to baby cam from different infants and on different days. When infants didn’t respond well to baby cam I think it was just that it was a strange sensation for them wearing the headband, much as very young children will often pull off sun hats.

Stage Direction

A long pause

Tina::

I know I have suggested that because they could pull the camera off they had an opportunity for dissent. But is this really meaningful dissent if, presumably, it is based purely upon the physical sensation of wearing the camera and not upon any understanding of what the camera is, what it does, or why it is there?

We tried to maximise the likelihood of infants giving assent. Only using baby cam for up to 10 minutes at a time was important. And also, allowing them an opportunity to hold and explore the camera if they wanted to, to try and build some level of familiarity with it. The highchair seemed to be a good place to use it – I think because they were busy concentrating on the task of eating which distracted them away from the sensation of wearing it.

Jennifer::

That shows consideration for infants – but it also invites discussion about the ethics of distraction as a strategy for gaining assent.

Sheena::

It’s like opening a can of worms isn’t it? Every point we make raises another one!

But some infants actively seemed to like wearing the baby cam and became quite involved with the camera. Sandi is a good example. She appeared excited when she saw it, jumped up and down, reached for it and became upset when I put it away. Even on the days when she didn’t appear to want to wear it, she often seemed interested in looking at it.

Tina::

I’m curious about why Sandi appeared to like the camera – what concept did she have of what it was and what it did? I wonder whether she might have enjoyed the direct interaction with Sheena or perhaps the way others treated her when she was wearing it, or just that it was something new and different that only SHE was allowed to wear?

Sheena::

If only we could ask!

Scene 3: Participation

Tina::

I’m going to play the devil’s advocate: Why is it that we think that baby cam might be more participatory than the researcher sitting quietly in a corner of the room with a hand-held video camera? Are we kidding ourselves that it is participatory because the infant is wearing the camera, that they are responsible for recording the footage? It’s not participatory in the sense that the infants presumably have no idea why the camera is on their head!

Sheena::

Are we arguing that it is participatory because they wear it? I agree that Sandi quite possibly had no idea of why the camera was on her head, or the images it might produce – let alone how we might use these images, for instance at conferences. Although it is interesting to note that she did watch some of the baby cam footage with us (me and the educator) and appeared to recognise the images. I can’t say though if she actually MADE the connection between the camera being on her head and the images she was watching – but I can’t say that she DIDN’T, either. Perhaps the participatory possibilities existed more in the relations that unfolded between me and Sandi in the moments when we were using, or going to use, the camera.

This seems quite different to locating the participatory possibilities in a piece of technology attached to an infant’s hat or headband. I’m not saying that the camera offered NO participatory possibilities; perhaps it did … by producing images that give the viewer a technologically mediated approximation of the infants’ bodily view of the world – a view that would be difficult to achieve otherwise.

Tina::

If it is only participatory in that it puts us in a situation where we must interact with the infant, then I’ve had many situations where infants initiated interactions with me as I was using the hand-held camera.

Sheena::

I think baby cam does perhaps offer more participatory possibilities than ‘sitting quietly in a corner of the room with a hand-held video camera’ because at least it REQUIRES some form of interaction between researcher and infant. Encounters between researcher and infant are important regardless of whether the camera is baby cam, hand held or tripod mounted. Like Tina, I have lots of examples where infants initiated interactions with me as I was using the tripod or hand-held camera. It is these interactions that I think are important because they have the potential to take the research into unexpected territory.

For example, Sandi didn’t always use the camera or respond to me using a camera in ways that I expected. She put her head under water while wearing the baby cam; and, sometimes when I was filming her, she came and looked through the viewfinder with me – rather than staying on the other side of the camera as I expected her to. It is almost as if she was appropriating the technology for her own purposes. It is how we respond to these moments that is important. For me, participation is about creating space in our thoughts and actions for these moments to matter to our research. In other words, enabling a space through which something new emerges between researcher and infant; something that might differ from our own planned mode of interaction or our own planned usage of particular research techniques

I would have some ethical concerns about using smaller cameras even if we could have found them. The smaller, more hidden and more discrete the camera, the more we’d seem to be deciding HOW infants can participate in the research. It seems to discount the value of what infants can bring to the encounter – their agencies and capacities to affect what unfolds. Is it possible that requiring them to participate by wearing a discrete camera that they have little, or no, control over might actually constrain possibilities for them to act? Would Gallagher (2005) say that it’s another form of surveillance?

It also raises questions about our willingness to engage with the harder-to-recognise forms of participation that might be playing out in our research encounters. For example, the ways in which infants might participate by affecting particular embodied responses in us. It is difficult, for instance, not to react bodily to infants’ expressions, their murmurs, their situations. Merleau-Ponty ( 1968 ) and Dillon ( 2012 ) say that it is not possible to halt the impact and intermingling of self and other in our human encounters. I am thinking mainly of Harry here, and the way he made me feel when he turned and looked at me when I was filming him. Although not specific to baby cam, in that one look I suddenly changed from being the ‘seer’ to the ‘seen’ and I find it very hard to discount his participation or involvement in that moment. Even though it was a subtle and perhaps not widely recognised, or easily recognisable, mode of participation, his look made me feel something: at the very least his look made me stop and question my own actions of continuing to film him. It also evoked feelings of sympathy, confusion, uncertainty, etc.…. All of these things occur through difference and suggest some form of reversible relation is at play. Perhaps this could also be understood as an awakening of our ethical consciousness about our own ways of being with infants in practice. Almost as if the infants’ agencies and desires decentre our own sense of self: a moment where we find ourselves confronting the need to make more deliberate choices about our actions because of the demand of the Other. Footnote 6

Tina::

What Sheena is saying is really interesting, but, as she has pointed out, baby cam was not required for these moments to occur; they can also occur through the use of other research methods. Baby cam, however, FORCED us into having a direct encounter with the infants as we fitted it. I have to say, though, that sometimes I felt that the infants might not be comfortable with me putting the headband and t-shirt on them, particularly in the earlier visits, as this was not a role they were used to me taking. In some cases I actually asked the educator to put the t-shirt on the child for me to help alleviate any potential discomfort on the infants’ part. The interactions that occurred while using the hand-held camera were generally spontaneous interactions initiated by the infant, for instance, crawling towards me and offering me a toy or reaching up to the camera. Perhaps these are more genuine participatory opportunities for the infant as they were initiated by the infant, not by me.

Ben::

I wonder how much the idea that baby cam is more participatory is because it gives babies greater power over our actions – because a baby can ‘agree’ or ‘refuse’ to wear it? This has less to do with the role of baby cam itself in our research and more to do with how much it has to do with giving the infant something that is very valuable to us because it can block what we want to do. For example, we could give the infant a portable light switch which could plunge the house (assuming no daylight!) into darkness whenever they pressed it. Presumably we would have to negotiate with the baby about this switch in order to do our research, as we do with baby cam. In fact, I think it’s quite a good idea! Why stop at assent? Why not go for dissent? Whenever an infant didn’t like something, they could plunge the room into darkness. But they would ‘not like’ lots of things that were not to do with research. And the same goes for their reaction to baby cam. They might throw it away/pull it off just because they were annoyed with the educator or a peer – nothing to do with the researcher or the research. AND they might just press the switch for fun.

Stage Direction

A momentary stunned silence as we digest this possibility. Some of us begin to imagine how we might incorporate such a light switch in our future research. The room then plunges into darkness!

Authors’ Notes

After our ‘Aha’ baby cam moment described in the prologue, we searched the literature for references to research involving infants wearing cameras on their heads. Our initial investigations led us to a laboratory study conducted by Yoshida and Smith (2008) to ascertain the relationship between the camera view and the direction of the infants’ gaze. Two years into our project, we became aware of the parallel development of a similar methodology to baby cam in New Zealand, where Jayne White, like us, was using split-screen technology to watch synchronised footage captured in a naturalistic early childhood setting. In White’s (2011) case, footage was captured from three cameras simultaneously, including via a camera mounted on an infant’s hat. Yoshida and Smith (2008) and White (2011) both used cameras operated by wireless transmitters, but, as explained more fully elsewhere (Sumsion et al. 2011), we were wary of the potential effects of radio waves in such close proximity to infants’ heads and settled for the more cumbersome and larger ‘lipstick style’ cameras attached by a cord to a small recording device. White’s study involved only one child, an 18-month-old toddler, who like 11-month-old Sandi in our project, made it clear that she wished to participate. In both cases, participation provided at least some scope for infant agency. We are less certain about what benefits, if any, infants like Peter (Table 10.2), who showed little interest in baby cam, gained from wearing it. We could find no instances in the literature of infants having access to the equivalent of the ‘light switch’ mooted by Ben as a means of making their consent to participate unequivocally clear!

Act 2: The Site of the Images

Authors’ Notes

Here we are concerned with the visual content of the image, including its framing and composition, its vantage point and spatial perspectives, its narrative potential, and other effects that command or divert the viewer’s attention (Rose 2012; Schirato and Webb 2004). Guided by the questions in Table 10.1, we are interested in the contradictions and/or juxtapositions that are evident and the purposes they perform.

Scene 1: Utility

Tina::

Although it’s not so evident in this footage (Table 10.2 ), we still couldn’t capture the infants’ full range of vision even with a wide-angle lens. Baby cam can tell us about the infants’ bodily perspective and where they are interested in focusing their attention but because of the technical challenges and limitations of the equipment, we can’t even be sure that these were captured accurately.

Could we have got the same (or indeed better) information and insights from having another hand-held camera positioned behind Peter (the infant in Table 10.2 ) instead of him wearing baby cam? Looking at the series of matched images (Table 10.2 ), what do we get from the two images together that we couldn’t have got from the handy cam images alone?

Jennifer::

Watching the dual footage from both cameras simultaneously on the split screen makes me feel quite queasy. I feel much less able to make sense of what I am seeing than if I’d seen the footage sequentially – but maybe I have a neurological processing problem!

Sheena::

I prefer to watch the footage sequentially, first the tripod camera and then the baby cam. Watching them together might be helpful though when we start some fine-detailed analysis.

Scene 2: ‘Authenticity’, Performance, Positioning, and Power Relations

Tina::

Is the baby cam footage a bit contrived? The adults and older children have shown a lot of interest in it. Does its highly visible nature change the way people around the infant ‘perform’? Do the images reflect an element of ‘Here is another camera being pointed at us! Let’s give the infant something interesting to look at’? Or even, ‘Let’s entertain the infant in an effort to distract attention away from the sensation of wearing baby cam’?

Sheena::

I agree. I think it might invite ‘performance’. But it’s not something I’ve particularly noticed. Often it was hard to know where the infant was even looking (often our feet or the ceiling!) or going to look next, which probably made ‘performance’ less likely than with tripod cameras. Polly [an educator] and I had NO idea that Sandi was going to put her face in the water bowl. There was no performance happening under the water – except perhaps by the toys in the water bowl if we use Lenz-Taguchi’s ( 2010 ) ideas about non-human entities having agency! We (and I include all the educators here) were often more concerned that the technology was even working than concerned with what it was filming!

Jennifer::

The footage of Peter and Cheryl (Table 10.2 ) has a naturalistic feel – I suppose because it’s captured such a familiar, everyday context and event. In terms of visual organisation, though, it’s a challenge to read. Are we meant to move from left to right, from Cheryl to Peter and back to Cheryl, zigzagging down the image? It seems to invite lots of questions and narratives about what is happening. In that sense it’s quite powerful. Why did we place the baby cam sequence on the left-hand side? Does it position Peter as object (of Cheryl’s attention) and target (of the spoon)? And Cheryl looms so large, especially in the frame she almost fills. That image really grabs viewers’ attention, but what are we meant to make of that? And what did Cheryl make of it?

Tina::

I certainly found it a bit of a shock when I saw myself on the baby cam footage. Suddenly the baby was researching ME?! I was used to being the one behind the camera, not in front of it!

Authors’ Notes

We are still developing our visual literacy capacities to read the baby cam images through the analytical frames of visual theorists such as Rose (2012). We accept that ‘every act of looking and seeing is also an act of not seeing’ (Schirato and Webb 2004, p. 14). Therefore, ‘deciding where to look is highly political because it involves deciding where not to look, what to exclude from sight…’ Thomas (2001, p. 4, original emphasis). Yet we have much to learn about recognising and articulating our political, as well as compositional decisions, in framing our baby cam images, and conversely in deciding what to omit (at the time of capturing the original video footage; in reducing it to manageable ‘units of analysis’; and in selecting inevitably brief excerpts for presentation and representation). We also have much to learn about technical aspects, such as perspective, in baby cam image production. To what extent, for example, should we discount distortions produced by the baby cam following infants’ head, rather than eye, movements and, especially with younger infants, the ‘wobbliness’ of their heads?

Act 3: Audience Encounters with Baby Cam Images

Authors’ Notes

Initial audience reaction to baby cam footage is invariably one of shock. Some appear shocked by the radical disturbance to their accustomed spatial perspectives and the subsequent defamiliarising of the familiar (Schirato and Webb 2004); others by the effects and potential consequences and possibilities of the infant’s gaze. For viewers who have been captured on baby cam footage, the shock can come from being the object of that gaze. Guided by the questions in Table 10.1, we are interested in how differently positioned audiences interpret baby cam images, the new meanings those images make possible and the shocks they engender, the new intentions they inspire and the politics surrounding the use of baby cam images.

Scene 1: On Voyeurism/Shock/Devereux

Ben::

So why DO we researchers find it a shock to see ourselves from the baby cam’s viewpoint?

One possibility is that baby cam invites us into a space which is ethically shocking. For example, the shock of being seen from the baby’s point of view is not particularly about the shock of being seen by the baby. This ‘being seen’ just dramatises the fact that baby cam invites us into a form of ‘voyeurism’ – whatever the baby is looking at (as we suggested at the start of this chapter). Yet how can a camera on a baby’s headband equate to voyeurism when a voyeur is usually defined as a person who gets gratification from spying on the naked flesh, pain or sexual antics of others?

One answer comes from film theory. In a famous article, Laura Mulvey argues that film has traditionally structured the movie camera’s ‘look’ as active and male, while the object of the look is passive and female. For Mulvey ( 1975 , p. 2), the narrative conventions of film create a voyeurism in which a curious and aroused (male, controlling) subject is remote from the ‘undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim’.

This could be taken up in a number of ways. We could gloss the ‘private world’ that we are prying into as the infant’s world. The infant is, after all, ‘unknowing’ of what we are doing when we put that headband on his/her head. Or we could widen our field of view to recognise that, here, the ‘male’ gaze of our tiny camera is spying on a quintessentially female world of caring for small children (all the educators in this study to date have been women). Hence perhaps the feeling that there is something voyeuristic about the vision we get through baby cam. Or we could, somewhat ingenuously, position ourselves as the ‘unknowing and unwilling victim’ – perhaps on the grounds that we didn’t realise how much directorial power we were giving the babies when we gave them baby cam!

Sheena::

I’m not at all keen on the word voyeurism in relation to researching with infants. And I don’t see a connection between voyeurism and the ethical shock that we’ve discussed at length in earlier conversations.

Jennifer::

It’s a confronting idea. But remember that Mulvey was writing in the 1970s, at a particular feminist moment. Rose ( 2012 , p. 167) argues that Mulvey’s work has been incredibly important in demanding that we think about ‘the gendering of who sees and who is seen’ but that, in many ways, it’s quite dated because it assumes a patriarchal, heterosexual narrative and a binary distinction between the male bearer of the gaze and the female object of that gaze. But the notion of gaze itself, and of its power, seems potentially very productive for our project, especially as we could explore it from diverse theoretical perspectives.

Ben::

Erm … ‘dated’, …. OK. Well, if we don’t like voyeurism as a concept, how about this as an explanation for the ‘shock’ Tina describes when seeing ourselves through the ‘eyes’ of the baby cam … According to Georges Devereux ( 1968 ), a fundamental anxiety structures behavioural research, surrounding observers’ wish to ward off the awareness that they are themselves observed by the subjects of their research. Unconsciously the observer knows they cannot subordinate the subject’s mental life to the researcher’s scheme of things. But, methodologically, researchers deny this and experimental artefacts result

(Bradley 2005 ). Devereux ( 1968 ) called his book From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioural Sciences because he believed that most of the science-like methods used in disciplines such as psychology are defences, attempts to deny or repress the anxiety of being observed and interpreted by others when one is ostensibly being a detached and invisible observer.

In Devereux’s account, this anxiety can be glossed as the researcher refusing to experience the subjective uncertainty of not knowing about others, anxiety about not having the same kind of epistemic authority that biologists have over microbes. Instead of experiencing this uncertainty, the social researcher acts out a controlling role that highlights ‘those moments of research when you feel like a disinterested scientist, secure in the knowledge that by following agreed-upon methods you are a part of discovering the world in an unbiased and objective way’ (Selby 1999 , p. 173). Devereux challenges us to ask what would happen if behavioural scientists became more aware of the fluidity of their own often unsettling experiences of others while doing research.

In this light, the shock of seeing footage from baby cam is the shock of having our bluff called, our defences breached, by empowering the vision of the Other, in this case, the previously objectified baby. This vision is traditionally repressed by the science-like methods of behavioural research. We are shocked by baby cam because we are being forced to acknowledge that the research situation is far more symmetrical than we have been trained to imagine:

Time and again it becomes evident that many difficulties in behavioural science are due to the warding off and ignoring of such interactions [between observed and observer] and especially of the fact that the observation of the subject by the observer is complemented by the counter-observation of the observer by the subject. This insight forces us to abandon -- at least in a naive sense -- the notion that the basic operation in behavioural science is the observation of a subject by an observer. We must substitute for it the notion that it is the analysis of the interaction between the two, in a situation where both are at once observers to themselves and subjects to the other. (Devereux 1968 , p. 275)

Stage Direction

Ben pauses for breath …

Sheena::

My understanding of ethics and thoughts about how we might talk about the shock of seeing oneself on film come more from Dillon ( 2012 ) who extends Merleau-Ponty’s ( 1968 ) ideas about reversibility/écart. It’s to do with the idea that seeing ourselves on film may bring with it a sort of ethical decentering because we suddenly find ourselves looking at ourselves. And also, possibly and more indirectly, looking at ourselves from something akin to the baby’s ‘standpoint’ since they were the one with the camera.

Using Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about reversibility and Dillon’s related work on ethics, it’s possible to think about the experience of seeing oneself through the eyes of the Other. But not necessarily a human Other. Baby cam footage can function as Other because it renders visible for the viewer their own presence in the world. Merleau-Ponty ( 1968 ) uses the term ‘reversibility’ (p. 147) to point to an overlapping or reflexive relation through ‘écart’ (or a moment of differentiation) (p. 124) that is present in our living experience: to see the thing is to feel the thing seeing me; to touch the thing is to feel the thing touching me … although this is a simplistic explanation.

According to Dillon ( 2012 ), this reversible relation through difference can provoke ethical reflection: do I see myself as I want to see myself; do I see myself as I would want you to see me etc..? I could go on!!

Ben::

Can I draw out a nuance from that, Sheena? If Merleau-Ponty and Dillon are right, then whenever we look at the baby, reversibility ensures that we feel the baby looking at us. What baby cam does is starkly confront us with a point which both Merleau-Ponty and Dillon make: that ‘I see the Other and the Other sees me; but I do not experience my being seen as he does’ (Dillon 1997, p.174; my emphasis). …Under normal conditions we do not question what we assume about the baby’s view of us. But baby cam thrusts it in our face: baby cam challenges the veridicality of reversibility. Normally, when we look at someone else, baby or not, we feel as if we see them seeing us. But baby cam proves such reversibility to be largely imaginary … our assumptions about the baby’s viewpoint are shown to be what Lacan would call a misrecognition. In his terms, baby cam is a shock because it shows the shallowness of our fantasised relationship to the baby, moving us towards the more decentred ‘thirdness’ of the symbolic order, the order in which what we have been calling ‘ethical reflexivity’ can arise Footnote 7

Tina::

For my part, seeing myself on the baby cam footage really did make me think more about what we are asking of the infant and the other children and adults around the infant, when they participate in this kind of visual research. It can be easy to lose sight of this when you have been in the field for quite some time. In the footage that I recorded [by tripod or hand-held camera], it is as if I was never there. The baby cam has allowed my presence to be recorded, it has put me in the picture both literally and figuratively.

But I also wonder how much of the shock is simply about suddenly and unexpectedly seeing yourself in the footage and the experience of seeing yourself from the outside – What was I wearing that day? Look at my hair! Similar to how we wonder, ‘Is that what I really sound like?’ when we hear an audio recording of ourselves.

Sheena::

So maybe some form of decentering was happening? You didn’t see what you expected to see and perhaps you were vulnerable to this difference? That’s where ethics as reflexivity comes in…

Scene 3: Other Audiences and Spectators

Tina::

Family Day Care Australia Footnote 8 was quite open about wanting to get a ‘good news story’ about family day care into the press. They saw baby cam as the vehicle for that. If not for baby cam, there would have been no publicity.

EVERYTIME I have presented on this study I have been asked to show baby cam footage! I find that a bit frustrating because there is a lot more to the study than baby cam. Sometimes I’d rather show other footage that better helps me make my point.

Sheena::

It probably wouldn’t have the same sort of audience impact.

Tina::

I think that a lot of the reaction that we have to baby cam is about the size of objects and spaces from their bodily perspective – it is a novel experience for us. It’s interesting, but what insight does it give us to the infants’ experiences? I think it can give us an idea of WHAT they are interested in looking at, but we can’t know WHY that might be or what that might MEAN.

Tina::

At conferences where I have shown baby cam footage people have wondered what it means for the infant to be in spaces – such as outside play spaces – that seem so big on the baby cam footage or to have objects, including people’s faces, appear so large (Table 10.2 ). One person wondered whether infants might find this frightening. But this is the infant’s daily experience, and there is nothing in their behaviour that would seem to indicate they are bothered by this. How are we to interpret these kinds of images?

So I guess I’m wondering to what extent the baby cam helps us to achieve the aims of the research, both in terms of understanding what life is like for infants and responding to the methodological challenges of attempting participatory research with infants. I’m not sure what the answer is but I think we need to think about the question.

Having said all that, after using baby cam footage at the Family Day Care Australia workshop, I think that baby cam IS an engaging means of encouraging discussion about infants’ experiences with educators and reminding educators about the importance of thinking about infants’ physical perspectives in their practice.

Sheena::

Maybe viewing the baby cam footage can decentre the viewer in ways that awaken their ethical consciousness and perhaps invoke questions, reflections and discussions about their own ways of being with infants in practice (including research practice). Put another way, perhaps it baby cam can foster reflexivity through difference.

I am not convinced that viewing baby cam footage can tell us an awful lot about infants’ own experiences, and I think we need to be careful about this point in relation to participatory research. Ultimately, WE construct what we call the infants’ experience. Footnote 9

Authors’ Notes

In various theoretical and every day connotations, ‘gaze’ has been a powerful theme throughout Act 3. Conventionally, ‘gaze’ refers to ‘a fixed or intent observation performed and controlled by the viewer through the eyes’ (Thomas 2001, p. 2). In contrast, from psychoanalytic perspectives (e.g. Lacan 1977) tangentially touched on by Ben (2nd author) and phenomenological perspectives (e.g. Dillon 2012; Merleau-Ponty 1968) as described by Sheena (4th author), gaze has a strong element of reciprocity. In other words, as Thomas (2001, p. 2) argues, rather than implying ‘a powerful and controlling spectator’, there is ‘no simple dichotomy between seeing and being seen but unstable roles that conflict and overlap’. Other theoretical and practice-based understandings and perspectives offer different conceptualisations of gaze. In our view, the diversity of ways of conceptualising gaze opens up an array of potentially productive methodological and interpretive possibilities that are yet to be fully explored by researchers, practitioners and others with an interest in infants’ experiences.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we heed Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (1992) exhortation to reveal the endemic uncertainties, tensions and challenges of research that so often go unacknowledged. While we have focused on our use of baby cam in the Infants’ Lives in Childcare project, the chapter contributes to broader discussions about ethical tensions in methodological innovation (Nind et al. 2012). These tensions are likely to be accentuated, we believe, by the seductiveness and affordances of emerging visual technologies such as baby cam. Our experience of baby cam leads us to strongly endorse warnings about the dangers of ‘uncritical romanticisation’ (Phillips and Shaw 2011, p. 610) of innovatory methodologies and technologies. We would like to think that this chapter might serve as reminder of the importance of attending to, and retaining a degree of scepticism towards, the rhetoric and promises that so often accompany innovative research technologies, and especially, it seems, visual technologies.

Accordingly, we conclude with the general observation that the use of technological apparatus has a rhetorical force in science and research which is independent of its practical utility. To most people, the cultural impact of sending men to the moon far outweighed the geological discoveries the trip has afforded. It was a paramount coup de theatre for modern science. As Buzz Aldrin (1969) said in a broadcast during the historic voyage of Apollo XI, ‘We feel this [first moon-landing] stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown’. Likewise, the age of ‘brass instruments’ in psychology is widely seen to have had more to do with showing that psychology had found a way to conform to the ‘techno-scientific’ ideal of the physical sciences than in producing earth-shattering research findings (Coon 1993).

We are not equating our baby cam innovation with major scientific breakthroughs! Rather, we are suggesting that one way of understanding others’ responses to baby cam is that it too has a certain rhetorical force: it neatly dramatises the key motivation underpinning our research project, that is, to understand how infants and toddlers experience early childhood settings. The practical utility of baby cam as a research methodology has turned out to be something quite different from what rhetorically it appears to offer: direct line of sight into the baby’s world. It is its ethical utility, we believe, that warrants continuing consideration.