Introduction: Crafting connections

This chapter presents filmmaking as a relational practice shaped by encounters and affiliations during fieldwork. It proposes to understand filmmaking as an approach to generating knowledge, with a focus on the methods and techniques that researchers use to audio-visually evoke the social realities of the people they work with. The tensions that arise from placing filmmaking between science and art are addressed through analytical frameworks that take account of a researcher’s subjectivity, reflexivity and vulnerability. Approaching filmmaking empirically, it argues, means linking the intellectual pursuit of knowledge creation with the human experience – physical, social and political – in and of the field. This is how researchers who extend themselves into complex realities manage to connect and broaden the ethnographic ‘I’ to a more collective and critical form of ethnographic ‘We’. The chapter delves deeper into the contributors’ camera-based research and the questions that arise from the tensions, failures and stories that remain hidden in an attempt to encourage a form of scientific inquiry that is accountable and committed to the social worlds they engage with.