Money Shots: The loss of empathy during visually driven ethnographic research (and how to retrieve it)

Persistent URL of this record https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3444050

In Collections

This item can be found in the following collections:

Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (MSc)

Rijn, Ruben van (2022)

Money Shots: The loss of empathy during visually driven ethnographic research (and how to retrieve it)

Master thesis | Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (MSc)

How important is getting the perfect shot? And what must make way for this? I use experiences from an ethnographic research period in an area threatened by climate change to argue how audiovisual methodologies may reduce researchers' feelings of empathy towards participants. This paper elaborates on diverse literature to demonstrate how both empathy and aesthetics can be of great importance when performing ethnographic research, and real-life examples to show how these concepts relate to eachother during fieldwork. Although this paper focuses specifically on the implications of audiovisual methodologies on me as a researcher, similar ideas may apply to anyone researching people in precarious situations. I have found that seeking empathy and prioritizing aesthetics can coincide with the help of collaborative creativity, on which I elaborate in the final chapter.

Empathy

aesthetic

ethnographic research