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

Abstract

This article presents accounts of four UK doctoral students' engagement in a Higher Education Academy project which used digital video (DV) to promote reflexivity on their doctoral journeys. Proceeding from participants' accounts of the production of their videonarratives, the article analyses the relations between doctoral research, reflexivity and the use of DV, and their articulation in different ways by the participants. As an ‘assemblage’, the written form of the article aims to evoke both the collaborative design of the project, in that it is constructed as a multivocality, a series of ‘plateaus’, and also the multiple, shifting and always in-process nature of identity, immanent in each individual's account. The accounts address how epistemological, ontological and ethical considerations are articulated within visual and vocal re-presentations of the self in the individual videonarratives. Each narrative both does (and does not) resonate with the other narratives and each offers insights into the specificities of particular doctoral journeys. In experimenting with this form of presentation, we aim 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 the ‘masks of methodology’.