Cinematic Research Practices | Research Proposal Assignment

Operationalizing Research Questions

(800-1000 words)

• Part 1 (100 words): Your assignment should begin by describing your research as a detailed case study that specifies in concrete terms where will you be doing your research and with whom. Your task is to be factually descriptive of the context.
• Part 2 (100 words): Next explain why you want to do this research, what is motivating you, and what you want to demonstrate with your research. With your concepts in mind and their relationship to anthropological debates in the literature, how will you operationalize your research so that it can contribute to anthropological knowledge?
• Part 3 (200 words): Elaborate what makes your chosen case simultaneously unique and generalizable. In other words, your research should be able to produce:
  1. detailed knowledge that provides insights about something not well understood (e.g., the role of transnational activists in the movement of refugees; the politics of historical commemoration in contemporary South Africa; the production of national identity in Aruba’s Grand Carnival Parade; ‘natural hair and beauty’ politics among hairdressers in Accra; everyday strategies domestic laborers use to cope with social crisis; the usage and experience of hormonal contraception; public and private boundaries around female masturbation; etc.), and
  2. generalizable knowledge that provides representative examples about something of greater interest and importance (e.g., national borders, religious diversity, ecological sustainability, protest politics, gender relations, decolonization politics, beauty standards, female sexuality, medical dependency, economic decline, migration policies, etc.)
• Part 4 (50-100 words): Taking your answers to the above prompts, reformulate your research question by answering the following questions and then convert these into a single question as demonstrated:
  • What do you want to learn about? (Description of a unique situation)
  • Why do you want to learn about it? (Analytical conceptualization)
  • Why is this important? (Research relevance / key concepts)For example:
  1. I’m trying to learn about: the social world of alternative media production in Beirut
  2. Because I want to understand how: contemporary Arab image-makers grapple with national histories of violence …
  3. This will help me contribute insights about: the way experimental visual approaches mediate the experience of postwar subjectivity, critique (neo-) orientalist representations, and activate intersections of public participation.Becomes:
  • My research explores the social world of alternative media production in Beirut, because I want to understand how contemporary Arab image-makers grapple with national histories of violence in order to address the way experimental visual approaches mediate the experience of postwar subjectivity, critique (neo-)orientalist representations, and activate intersections of public participation.Other examples:
  • This research explores the political intervention of congregants of Kasr al-Dubara Evangelical Church since January 2011, because I want to understand how rhetoric and power mobilized religious subjectivities in Kasr al-Dubara Church toward new political projects and activisms. This study will analyze how Evangelical Egyptians, as members of a precariously situated religious minority, are negotiating their own histories and the current political arena in order to carve out a space in the public debates over citizenship, good governance, and belonging.
  • My research will use visual ethnographic methods to examine the primary school curriculum reform in Timor-Leste, because I want to comprehend how different visions of education, working environments, and communications media and practices shape education policy. This study seeks to contribute to current debates and ethnographic knowledge about how global education policies are re-contextualized in diverse localities and in the various layers of the policy–to–practice process, including international development organizations, government, the reform project, and schools.
• Part 5 Draft 4-6 sub-questions that are clearly motivated by your research, but break the main question into smaller parts. The sub-questions are not additional questions, but rather the concretization of the main research question. These are the things you need to know in order to answer your research question. For each sub-question, indicate whether it is descriptive (who, what, where) or analytic (how, why). In other words, is it aimed at describing/establishing what is happening in the field or at explaining/interpreting what is happening in the field. Lastly, indicate if the sub-question will be answered through film, text, or a combination.
  • For example, “What are the various institutional structures that shape women’s experience with hormonal contraception?” is a descriptive question, versus “How do these structures influence women’s experience with hormonal contraceptives?,” which is an analytical question.

Methodology & Ethics

(Word Count for total assignment: 3000-4000)

With the focus of your research better defined and your research questions clearly worked out, it is time to start thinking about how you will produce the data necessary to answer your main research question and corollary sub-questions. Whereas method refers to a particular research technique (interviewing, participant observation, questionnaire surveying, focus groups, photo elicitation, etc.), methodology is the theoretical conceptualization of the research approach. Put another way, methodology is the logic that links your research methods to your research question as well as the rationale for linking your questions to particular methods. In other words, methodology both describes how you will generate data and why the chosen methods are the best for addressing the questions identified.

Visual Ethnography is thus a methodological framework that links various modalities of audiovisual recording to particular epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic sensibilities. Some of your sub-questions should be specifically related to your visual ethnographic approach and output, while others sub-questions will be addressed in your written ethnographic output. That said, your thesis text should specifically draw upon your visual ethnographic methodology, while also encompassing methods that are not specifically visual. In sum, your task is to clearly and concisely explain the logic that supports your approaches in addressing the following questions.

Don’t forget to make citational references to support your choices. These should be drawn from both the various materials (texts, films, audio recordings, etc) assigned in these modules as well as from sources that you have identified in your own research.

This is the last proposal assignment you’ll have before drafting your own complete proposal due to your supervisor by the end of November. Please don’t underestimate the time needed for this. We have intentionally left you time free at the end of November in order to focus exclusively on this task. Ideally, your five Research Proposal Assignments can be simply inserted into your proposal, but in practice these will need updating, expanding, and clarifying in that process. Please refer to the sample proposals, the proposal guidelines document, and the AAA ethical guidelines for further assistance. During the final Proposal Writing Exercise, we will cover the details fo the proposal in more depth.

1. Research Questions: What is your research question and sub-questions (provide the latest rendering of these)?
2. Evidence / Knowledge: How will you approach each of these questions? What evidence (empirical data) do you need to be able to answer each of the sub-questions? How will that evidence afford you ways of answering these questions? In other words, what kinds of knowledge do you hope to generate through the research process, particularly through filmic recording?
3. Method / Methodology: What is the best way to gather this evidence and why is this the best way? Provide a substantive rationale for each method and how it will produce the desired evidence.
   • On the one hand, this means you need to diversify your methods so they compliment each other. How are these methods applied together with other techniques and methods in the ethnographic toolkit? You must think concretely about what you want to know and how you can best generate that information as well as what you cannot learn from each method.
     • Regarding the visual anthropological research-process as a set of methods and techniques, consider the camera as an instrument of research for observation, sensory engagements, performative methods (ethnoficions, re-enactments, role play, etc.), interviews, elicitation, life-/oral history, documentation of material culture, intangible cultural heritage, geographies, landscapes, infrastructures, mappings, etc.
     • What types of shots, compositions, framings, sequences, events, movements, scenes, juxtapositions, combinations, stories, narratives, discourses, etc. will inform your cinematic approach?
   • On the other hand, this means considering the necessary role of experimentation and the possibility of failure and how to consider contingencies. This means proceeding with ethical care, but also open to what we learn when things don’t go as expected. Unlike other sciences that rely on the reproducibility of evidence, anthropology also relies on seizing on unexpected chance encounters. This is the generative aspect of our discipline’s process: we are making original research to generate new knowledge.
4. Ethics & Positionality: The ethics of an outside researcher immersing herself in the world of others in order to communicate publicly must be at the center of your methodological framework. This means thinking through the ethical implications of your chosen methods and how will you ensure the security of your participants. While you should refer to ethical standards, like the AAA code of ethics and Crowder and Marion’s list of visual ethics (2013: 6-7), the ethics you develop and practice will be specific to the context and relationships that inform your research project.
   • Consider these questions as prompts: How do you decide which ethical standards to apply or not, and why or why not? How might various approaches affect access to and types of information collected in the field? What types of ethical concerns do you expect to encounter in the field and how do you anticipate such challenges? How might your research provoke particular sensitivities and how will you ensure your and your research collaborators’ security? How might these influence your film/research-process as well as restrictions for publication/screening? When engaging with the people in the field, how will you explain the aims of your research? How will you ensure participants’ consent? How will you use elements of reflexivity, auto-ethnography, advocacy, etc. to critically account for your positionality vis-à-vis your research?
5. Analysis & Editing: In order to properly connect your methods to your questions, you need to anticipate the later phases when you return from the field and must begin to process all your research materials.
   • Consider these questions as prompts: How will you analyze the data you produce? What type of editing-principles and pacing will inform your cinematic approach — continuity editing, dialectical montage, the long take, etc.? How will you present the evidence and your insight to be accessible to others? Will you place emphasis on senses, emotions, speech, sound, narrative, being there, sharing ‘the gaze’ of the researcher or of the participants, etc.? What are the structuring and narrative principles? How do you anticipate your narrative structure/multimedia presentation looking like? Will the structure be inspired by anthropological analysis and/or comparison, or by a more ethnographic descriptive approach following and/or representing patterns and processes in the field? What audience(s) will be addressed by the production? How do you want the viewers to engage with the (reality of) the subject(s) of your research through the film?
6. Sample Scene, photo series, exhibitional unit, etc.: Whether working toward a film output or an alternative modality, it’s important to visualize your outputs. Imagine, or perhaps you already know, the main persons, activities, events, locations, etc. that will become the building blocks for your output. What is happening? What do we see and hear? What is the perspective taken? Describe this as tangibly as possible, then write a short summary of the significance of the scene in relation to your questions. In other words, why is this an important and useful scene to include?

Sources cited:

Marion, Jonathan and Jerome Crowder

2013 Visual Research: A Concise Introduction to Thinking Visually. Bloomsbury Academic, London.