SEEING IS BELIEVING: ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN VIDEOGRAPHIC METHODS

Thursday, October 13, 2022, 12:30 - 2:00 PM (PT)

The Centre for Law & the Environment (CLE) at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, in collaboration with Green College, hosted a workshop on incorporating creative methods into socio-legal research.  

Many scholars have turned to cameras in recent decades to bring greater authenticity to field research.  In contrast to text-based or graphic representations of data, photographic images are thought to more directly express the lived experiences of participants. Yet pictures can be seductively misleading. With visual methods, and particularly when those images are edited in the form of a documentary, the audience experiences images as a direct window into the lives and worlds of participants.

In this workshop, professor and documentary filmmaker Jan Haaken introduced key principles guiding her participatory action research projects and presented a series of ethical dilemmas that have emerged in projects that have developed into documentary films. In discussing ethical dilemmas that arise in visual storytelling, Haaken presented video clips from her documentaries and offered questions for the audience to consider in working at the boundaries between fact and fiction, reality and representation.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Janice Haaken is professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist, and documentary filmmaker. From refugee camps, war zones and abortion clinics to drag bars, dairy farms and hip-hop clubs, her documentary films focus on people carrying out stressful jobs on the social margins and in liminal spaces, and on work that has become the focus of public anxieties. She is author of Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back, Hard Knocks: Domestic Violence and the Psychology of Storytelling and Psychiatry, Politics, and PTSD: Breaking Down and co-editor of Memory Matters: Understanding Recollections of Sexual Abuse. Her films include “Queens of Heart: Community Therapists in Drag,"“Guilty Except for Insanity,” “Mind Zone: Therapists Behind the Front Lines," "Our Bodies Our Doctors," and the two-part series, "Necessity: Oil, Water & Climate Resistance” and Necessity: Climate Justice & the Thin Green Line.