Cinemaethnographic specta(c)torship: discursive readings of what we choose to (dis)possess

This article examines critical methodological issues emerging from the interstices of applied educational research, social science research, and arts-based research, bringing criticality into the field of childhood. The author aims to question how she might w(rest)le (un)comfortably with "what is worth looking at" when studying children. Maneuvering between observations of children in classrooms and representations of children in film, the author will not only consider ways she enacts discrete performances of specta(c)torship but also how she might resist revoking one performance for another within her "practices of looking" by conjuring the menace of ambivalent narratives. Rather than falling into familiar framing devices that serve to embrace some, but prohibit other ways of seeing, she will procure notions of colonialism and restless hybridity to incite antagonistic play on the edges of ethnographic specta(c)torship, drawing on Stronach’s notion of "lean-to" concepts