Lucy Caton
Previous ESRI postgraduate researcher
Becoming Researcher: Navigating a post-qualitative inquiry involving child participants and wearable action cameras
Principle Supervisor: Professor Maggie MacLure
Supervisor: Dr Abigail Hackett
PROJECT OVERVIEW
My name is Dr Lucy Caton and I have recently completed my PhD within ESRI (Education Social Research Institute) at Manchester Metropolitan University.
My research is cross-disciplinary and draws on child participatory inquiry, philosophy and visual methodologies. The research was conducted with children between seven and 11 years old in a school-based computer club.
I draw on the philosophies of Deleuze (1989) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2014) to enable something more to be said about children’s lives within community and educational scenarios. I explored visual research practices with a GoPro camera that acknowledges a kinship between the object, the subject and the image, that went beyond the photographic apparatus in order to evoke new sense perceptions.
I challenged accepted theories to think beyond normative practices of analysing educational video research with child participants. This visual/sensory methodological study contributed to questioning the ‘relative humanness of child’ in order to re-think child subjectivity as a creation of potentialities in association with the camera and the resultant video ‘data’.
I created the technique of ‘video data sensing‘ (Caton,L, 2019) felt at the level of experiments with digital pixels, in the video recorded by the children. I use the technique of ‘video data sensing‘ to de-centre the child in the action and provoke a ‘haptic’ (Marks, 2000) visualisation of the classroom. This practice required a shift in thinking about the role of the researcher that emphasised the unfolding nature of ‘doing‘ video research where knowledge remained detached from accounts of subject-driven-agency.
The fundamental question has been to ask what the video does and how it does it, rather than what the content meant through normative socio-cultural perspectives.
REPORTS AND publications
Whitton, N., McNicol, S., Caton, L., Lewin, C., Whitton, P. & Wilby, C. (2018) The Playful Teacher: Development of a Model and Measurement Scale. Frontiers in Psychology
Caton, L. and Hackett, A. (2019) ‘Head mounted, chest mounted, tripod or roaming? Ontological possibilities for doing visual research with children and GoPro cameras.’ In Kucirkova, N., Rowsell, J. & Fallon, G. (eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Playing and Learning with Technology in Early Childhood. Oxon: Routledge
Caton, L. (March 2019) Video Data Sensing: A new methodological approach for child participatory video research. Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy Special Issue: Videography and Decolonising childhood
Caton, L. (May 2019) Video Blogging: A route to exploring children’s social-material-discursive practices in the classroom. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy
Caton, L. (July 2019) Re-thinking the ‘doing’ of ethics within child participatory video research: Tales from a post-qualitative inquiry. The International Journal of Qualitative Inquiry
book review
Caton, L. (2018) Visual Methodologies Edition 4, by Gillian Rose, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy
conference presentations
Video Data Sensing a new methodological approach to child participatory video research. Children and Childhood Seminars, Education Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University (May 2019)
Visual methodologies after the post-human turn: Child participatory research involving action cameras in an after-school club. Reconceptualising Early Childhood Literacy, Digilit Conference, Manchester (March 2019)
Head Mounted, chest mounted, roaming and static: The methodological potential of a GoPro camera in a school based computer club. 5th Conference on Arts Based Research and Artistic Research, Liverpool, Tate Modern (2018)
Head Mounted, chest mounted, roaming and static: The methodological potential of a GoPro camera in a school based computer club. Children and Childhood Conference and Seminar Series, Education Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University (2018)
Creating video based research practices that think: The methodological possibilities for a GoPro camera in a school based computer club. BERA (British Education Research Association) Special Interest Group, Children and Childhoods, Newcastle University, Newcastle (2018)
The Methodological possibilities for a GoPro camera in a school based computer club. BERA (British Education Research Association) Special Interest Group, Children and Childhoods, The University of Sussex, Brighton (2017)
Child Participatory Video Research in and the possibilities for a GoPro camera. Postgraduate Student Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester (2017)
Child Participatory Video Research in and the possibilities for a GoPro camera. Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester (2016)
Child Participatory Video Research through a Deleuzian theoretical lens. Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth conference, Sheffield (2015)