Video Ethnography: Theory, Methods, and Ethics

Video Ethnography provides a thought-provoking, guided framework to ethnographic filmmaking. It examines how this kind of filmmaking can be a means of approximating, mediating and evoking lived experience. Functioning as a kind of sensory extension of the videographer, video ethnography arises directly out of lived experience as a process of dynamic encounters, mobile situations, and embodied approaches that include senses and choices of the videographer, and the participants of the ethnography. The book will help describe and develop students‘ sensibility and awareness of this crucial aspect of video ethnography, so they can craft their own video ethnographies with a fully conscious awareness of how certain skilled and attuned approaches to audiovisual techniques can help facilitate the fullest and most dynamic encounters possible. This book is suitable for classes in ethnographic filmmaking, video ethnography and visual anthropology / sociology.

David Redmon received his Ph.D. in sociology from SUNY-Albany. His documentaries have premiered at Sundance, Toronto, the Museum of Modern Art, Viennale Film Festivals, and other international destinations. Redmon is a former Radcliffe Fellow and Film Studies Fellow at Harvard University. He is currently an independent scholar, filmmaker, and Fellow at the IMeRA Institute for Advanced Study at University of Aix-Marseille, France.