Ethnocinema: Intercultural collaborative video as method

The arts-based educational research project Culture Shack ran from 2011 to 2012 in Melbourne, Australia, in collaboration with artists and scholars from the United States and Canada. This study sought to build arts-based pathways for migrant and refugee-background students through community-located arts workshops, and document them using ethnocinematic and other research methods. Ethnocinema is a methodology that I began to develop during my doctoral studies from 2007 to 2009 with Sudanese Australian young women, in which we made collaborative videos about their educational experiences in resettlement (Harris, 2012). While the terminology of ethnocinema had been used sporadically by visual ethnographers since the time of famed French anthropologist Jean Rouch, I began to articulate a new methodology that extended his work using collaborative research and film-making methods. This chapter examines the challenges and possibilities of using ethnocinema as a research method that responds to the increasingly intercultural work of educators, artists, activists, ethnographers and other social scientists. Here, I offer suggestions for ways in which beginning researchers can build ethical collaborative studies, research methodologies that address the experiences of both researchers and their participants and methods that use film and video as more than just tools for data collection. Finally, I question how researchers might remain committed to mutual collaborative processes that are both ethically and aesthetically responsive, even when geographically remote from their participants.