Do You Want to Watch a Movie?: Conceptualizing Video in Qualitative Research as an Imaginative Invitation

In the early 1970’s and into the 90’s philosophic and ethnographic worlds encountered a crisis of representation. During this time, the world of qualitative research opened up to include a deep and meaningful exploration of the guiding epistemological, ontological and axiological values inherent in inquiry. Scholars began exploring the how and why of representation in the context of qualitative research. This paper is positioned as a continuation of that line of inquiry. In the following pages, we investigate the role of representation in qualitative research and postulate the medium of video as a means for opening up new ontological possibilities for how we represent our research findings. We explore the idea of video as an imaginative invitation for the viewer/audience to collaborate and engage in research.