In the introduction to the journal Television and New Media special issue on “Media Education: Dilemmas of Perspective Policy and Practice”(2003) Means Coleman and Fisherkeller write;

Media education needs to encourage critical analysis, production, and new forms of communication that can help all of us imagine as well as implement systems that embody and encourage equal access, opportunity, expression, and power—systems that do not currently exist. (p. 348)

The methodological basis for this project takes the above quote as a point of departure. In it the authors suggest that a critical and reflexive engagement with media helps us find new forms of participation and growth. Reflexivity is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as:

1 a: directed or turned back on itself; also: overtly and usually ironically reflecting conventions of genre or form, b: marked by or capable of reflection: reflective.

In terms of method, process and design, this project is an effort at creating reflexive community research. As a project, its form makes ‘overt’ reference to the practice being studied, media production. Though research-oriented, the method of collection, and public distribution of this project reflects the influence of community media, where groups of stakeholders address their experience through video or audio and then put the work back into circulation to benefit a wider audience. In the second sense of the term “marked by or capable of reflection” interviewees are offered multiple opportunities to re-engage with the content of their interviews, to make suggests, corrections, and to put it bluntly, influence the direction of the research. In describing her qualitative research with youth participants Elizabeth Soep writes:

When young people do more then run audio-recorders and turn over their tapes to adults for analysis – when they actually participate in interpreting the recorded moments, and gain exposure to all the various dimensions of conducting research – not only do we expand our conventions for gathering and reporting data, but we also have the potential to produce narratives that both talk about and function as moments of education. (Soep, 2003, p. 4)

Part of the pleasure of this research has come from giving my friends and colleagues, some time to reflect on their work, and the relationships and power structures that inform their experience. Furthermore, research participants do not simply “turn over their tapes” after we have finished recording. The editing process has participatory aspects, as does the post- edit analysis of online materials by the group. In this way, the research process is opened up and can become, if successful, dialogic. It is this desire for a reflexive dialogue that has led me to choose to publish these interviews as part of a public website. In addition, this work has allowed me to reflect on my own practice and on my ‘place’ in the system both as an academic, a youth worker, and a citizen in the knowledge economy. If there is one unifying methodological metaphor that can be employed to explain this work, it is a circle, the constant return to themes, moments, offices, people, questions, and eventually to an understanding.

James Lyng students working with Kate

In using a research methodology that is participatory and gives concrete evidence of the democratizing potential of media literacy, this work also uses concepts of citizen’s or alternative media (Rodriguez, 2004). In seeking to engage with multiple voices, and create dialogue rather than presenting evidence, I am attempting to integrate some of the practices used in the creation of citizen’s media projects. Perhaps as shorthand this approach could be called Citizen’s Research. In citizens research community members and the researcher coproduce understandings and analysis, interviews become collective efforts and the interviewee is invited to become more deeply involved in the process by adding commentary, reviewing transcripts and giving feedback, even withholding segments.

In a coproduction it is not the prerogative of the researcher to define the results of the research, but to define a framework in which the collected data is best displayed and analyzed by a group of community participants. In this project, by creating a structure in which qualitative data is accessible and open for comment and reappraisal the collaborative nature of community research comes to the foreground.
The risk of coproduction is that one research party may be less engaged, or feel that they have less at stake in the work. This is certainly the case here, where the project in question serves the researchers personal interest, but will only serve the interests of the research subjects if they find that the data presented resonates with and benefits their community, work and concerns. However, if after the posting of interview clips the community does not take an active part in dialoging on the site, the project will remain relevant as a qualitative enquiry.