I did it my way: Voice, visuality and identity in doctoral students’ reflexive videonarratives on their doctoral research journeys

This paper presents four accounts of UK doctoral students’ engagement in a Higher Education Academy project which used digital video to promote participants’ reflexivity on their doctoral journeys. It focuses on the relations between doctoral research, reflexivity and the use of digital video, and how these relations are articulated in different ways by the project participants in the production of, and reflection on, their own videonarrative. As an ‘assemblage’, the written form of the paper aims to evoke both the collaborative design of the project, in that the paper is constructed as a multivocality, a series of ‘plateaus’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p22), and also the multiple, shifting and always in-process nature of identity, immanent in each individual’s account. In different ways, the accounts address how epistemological, ontological and ethical considerations are articulated within a visual and vocal re-presentation of the self in the form of individual videonarratives. Each narrative both does (and doesn’t) resonate with the others’ narratives and each offers unique insights into the specificities of a particular doctoral journey. In experimenting with this form of presentation, the aim is to bypass traditional accounts of research ‘findings’ as a form of transparent knowledge production and, instead, work within a mode of representation which seeks to acknowledge what Lather (2007, p119) calls the ‘masks of methodology’.

Keywords: voice, visuality, identity, doctoral students, reflexivity, videonarrative