"Look at my eyes, they’re lush”: representing mediated identities in longitudinal participatory research with children and young people in public care. Advancing the use of visual methods in researching children’s cultures

This presentation is in critical dialogue with the increasing turn to visual and participatory methodologies in which children are the primary ‘data generating’ agents. It is also in critical dialogue with the visual ethnographic mapping of everyday lives and identities within a wider cultural context of individualised video diaries and the media gaze that creates and incites a range of visual representations of the confessional and psychologised performative self (e.g. reality TV). To engage with these debates we draw upon on an on-going longtitudinal ESRC-funded research project, (Extra)Ordinary Lives: Children’s Everyday Relationship Cultures In Public Care. This is one of four demonstrator projects within the Qualitative research node (Qualiti) of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods. The central methodological aim for the ‘(Extra)ordinary Lives’ project1 was to develop a research environment for a small number children and young people aged between 10 and 21 where they could choose their own level of involvement and their own methods to record and represent aspects of their lives and identities through making available a range of experimental methods from auto-ethnographic to activity based techniques (e.g. film-making, photographic diaries, music productions, visual/textual diaries, scrap-books/collages, audio and visual guided tours and, unexpectedly, car conversations). These research activities, combined with our reflexive participatory approach, have proven to be quite productive in generating a rich and diverse assemblage of multimodal representations of everyday lives and identities (in-context, in-history, inculture, and in-imagination). Towards the end of the fieldwork, we were especially struck by the synergy between young people’s reflexive and shifting engagement with the media in recording and representing them-selves and what we (the research team) were learning more widely about their performed and edited subjectivities throughout the fieldwork in a range of ways (from reflexive discussions of edited footage, to dis/engagements with particular visual technologies). It is this diverse and changing relationship of how young people differently took-up the opportunity to generate mediated representations of the self that takes centre stage in this presentation with a view to critically engaging with research that incorporates multimedia methods in ethnographic explorations of children’s cultures and social identities