Enhancing Meaning-Making in Research through Sensory Engagement with Material Objects

There has been increasing awareness and interest in the role of the senses in qualitative research. We build on this work by focusing on the use of material objects in research. Using material objects in qualitative research, particularly those selected by research participants, offers a different kind of engagement that can add richness and complexity to the knowledge generated. Material objects can either be participant-selected or researcher-selected, each having its own benefits and challenges. Using examples, we explore how participants sensorially engage with these objects, using visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile means. This engagement with material objects, particularly those that are personally meaningful to participants, is useful when examining research topics that may be sensitive or abstract; it offers the potential for participants to identify salient associations and/or express what may be otherwise unsayable. We discuss practical strategies in using material objects as well as the ethical challenges and possible products of such research

Adding the agentic capacities of visual materials to visual research ethics

The focus of visual research ethics has largely been on the ethical effects of visual research on participants. There is increasing identification of how researchers are ethically affected by visual research. However, there has been no sustained examination into how visual materials themselves have ethical consequences in visual research. In this paper we argue visual research presents with particular ethical challenges because of the agentic capacities of the visual materials themselves. The paper draws on a research project where participants generated two different kinds of visual materials: timeline charts and photos. We show how timeline charts and photos have contrasting imaginative, bodily, memory and synaesthetic capacities. The agentic capacities of the visual materials act in specific ways to co-create a network of relations across the research encounters. This network of relations has the capacity to act in particular ethical ways with serious consequences not just for research participants, but also for researchers. We propose the action of visual materials themselves needs to be added to ethical discussion about visual research. Drawing on the concept of ethical sustainability, we advocate for extending situated ethics and researcher reflexivity to include consideration of the agentic capacities of visual materials themselves

Adding the agentic capacities of visual materials to visual research ethics

The focus of visual research ethics has largely been on the ethical effects of visual research on participants. There is increasing identification of how researchers are ethically affected by visual research. However, there has been no sustained examination into how visual materials themselves have ethical consequences in visual research. In this paper we argue visual research presents with particular ethical challenges because of the agentic capacities of the visual materials themselves. The paper draws on a research project where participants generated two different kinds of visual materials: timeline charts and photos. We show how timeline charts and photos have contrasting imaginative, bodily, memory and synaesthetic capacities. The agentic capacities of the visual materials act in specific ways to co-create a network of relations across the research encounters. This network of relations has the capacity to act in particular ethical ways with serious consequences not just for research participants, but also for researchers. We propose the action of visual materials themselves needs to be added to ethical discussion about visual research. Drawing on the concept of ethical sustainability, we advocate for extending situated ethics and researcher reflexivity to include consideration of the agentic capacities of visual materials themselves

Re/formulating Ethical Issues for Visual Research Methods

This paper discusses six categories of key ethical issues that are important to consider when using visual methods in social research. The categories were identified during workshop discussions with researchers working across disciplines and using a range of visual methods. They have been used to inform guidelines for the ethical conduct of research using visual methods. The categories represent both familiar and emerging ethical challenges. They include widely accepted strategies for meeting ethical obligations to ensure participants’ informed consent, to maintain confidentiality, and to design and conduct research that minimises harm. Three further categories represent more novel ethical issues that are particularly prominent in visual methods: managing fuzzy boundaries around the multiple purposes that visual research may serve, addressing questions of authorship and ownership of visual products generated during research, and dealing with representation and audiences when disseminating research findings. In this paper we reflect on the tensions and challenges these issues raise for researchers working with visual methods, and consider potential strategies to address these challenges. By identifying and critiquing ethical issues that are prominent in visual methods, this paper contributes to a growing body of work that aims to ensure the ethical conduct of visual research

Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies

Sound studies and Deaf studies may seem at first impression to operate in worlds apart. We argue in this article, however, that similar renderings of hearing, deafness, and seeing as ideal types - and as often essentialized sensory modes - make it possible to read differences between Sound studies and Deaf studies as sites of possible articulation. We direct attention to four zones of productive overlap, attending to how sound is inferred in deaf and Deaf practice, how reimagining sound in the register of low-frequency vibration can upend deafhearing dichotomies, how “deaf futurists“ champion cyborg sound, and how signing and other non-spoken communicative practices might undo phonocentric models of speech. Sound studies and Deaf studies emerge as fields with much to offer one another epistemologically, theoretically, and practically

Unravelling the account of menopause as hormone deficiency: working practices of the menopause clinic

© 1996 Dr. Marilys Noelle GuilleminThe menopause arena is highly political and is riddled with controversies and complexities. Debates rage about the medicalisation of an otherwise normal life event and the use of HRT, particularly the association of HRT with increased risks of cancer, as well as its use in the long term prevention of osteoporosis and heart disease. Feminists have made significant and worthwhile contributions towards addressing these and related issues, as well as opening up these debates to public scrutiny. Within this controversial forum, one particular understanding of menopause has gained prominence, namely the notion of menopause as a disease of deficient hormones. The focus of this thesis is on how this particular concept of menopause has come to be stabilised as ‘fact’. I argue that this understanding of menopause as hormone deficiency is a socio-material construction, and as such, is only one of many possible constructions of menopause. Given these possibilities, how then has this particular understanding come to be so prevalent, not just in medical practice but in everyday life? To examine this question, I employ a feminist interactionist science studies approach which focuses on how knowledge is generated through the standardisation of social-material practices. This approach combines (i) science studies, in particular actor network theory, (ii) symbolic interactionism, emphasising interactionist studies which bridge the gap between science studies and symbolic interactionism, and (iii) feminist critiques of medicine, science and technology. I situate my exploration in menopause clinics - specialised, largely medical sites where women's menopausal problems are managed and treated. The menopause clinic brings together many disparate collectives, including gynaecologists, endocrinologists, physicians and psychologists each providing different forms of specialised management, as well as material technologies such as bone densitometry, HRT, mammography and ultrasound. My focus is on the every day practices of the menopause clinic which both maintain the very existence of the clinics and are vital to the production of knowledge about menopause. Several key practices of the clinic are examined to show how the particular understanding of menopause as hormone deficiency is constructed and generated through the working of these practices. Focussing on these social-material practices and interactions reveals how this particular understanding of menopause is shaped and stabilised. In tracing the stabilisation of the menopause clinic and its concomitant understanding of menopause as hormone deficiency, I argue that despite its seemingly stable facade, the menopause arena is fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. Positioning my focus at the level of practices reveals that many of the clinic’s practices are simultaneously complicit and resisting. I follow these interruptions to the clinic’s network of relations and trace how they offer potential disruptions to the current orderings of the clinic and the prevalent understanding of menopause as hormone deficiency. Directing attention to how particular knowledge claims come about makes visible other possible outcomes, thus opening up potential reconstructions of current knowledge claims about menopause

The Right Doctor for the Job: International Medical Graduates Negotiating Pathways to Employment in Australia

Skilled medical migrants must negotiate complex pathways to local employment in their new home countries. Accreditation and registration systems are promoted as standardized assessments of competence. To date, literature on this topic has tended to focus on organizational, political, economic and ethical issues, rather than how individuals encounter and subsequently negotiate employment pathways. We help address this gap by drawing on ethnographic interviews with migrant doctors studying and working in Australia. We find that negotiating employment pathways is a process entailing significant financial, personal, professional and emotional investment on the doctors’ behalf. We discuss the creativity and social and emotional labour entailed and the consequences of this on what it means to be a healthcare professional in the midst of increasing global worker mobility.Les médecins qualifiés migrants doivent faire face à un processus complexe pour avoir accès à un emploi dans leur société d’accueil, où les systèmes d’accréditation et d’inscription leur sont présentés comme des preuves standardisées de compétence. À ce jour, les recherches à ce sujet ont tendance à se concentrer sur les problèmes d’ordre organisationnel, politique, économique et éthique plutôt que sur la façon dont chaque individu est confronté au parcours vers l’emploi, puis de la façon dont il y fait face. Cet article souhaite pallier ce manque en s’appuyant sur des entrevues ethnographiques réalisées auprès de médecins migrants étudiant et travaillant en Australie. Le parcours vers l’emploi semble requérir de la part du médecin un investissement significatif d’un point de vue financier, personnel, professionnel et émotionnel. Cet article s’intéresse à la créativité et à l’effort social et émotionnel dont ces médecins font preuve durant ce processus ainsi qu’aux conséquences de celui-ci sur la définition même du professionnel de la santé dans un contexte d’accroissement global de la mobilité de la main-d’oeuvre

Questions of process in participant-generated visual methodologies

C5 - Other Refereed Contribution to Refereed Journal