Video production, collaborative video and video ethnography combine media skills within a social action framework. In some cases video is a way for researchers, teachers, community workers and others to collaborate with participants on particular subjects while in other cases, participants are taught media skills which enable them to make short and medium length video projects completely on their own.

We propose to expand an understanding of video methodology to include uses by arts groups, community video projects, and filmmakers as well as how it has been used by ethnographers such as Sarah Pink and others.

In relation to video ethnography, we are interested in ethnographic uses of video which highlight the collaborative nature of the process.

Rather than the researcher being the active party who both extracts data and gives something else back, in this model both researcher and informant invest in, and are rewarded by, the project. Recent work with video and photography shows how these media can be used to develop very successful collaborative projects. In some case this has empowered informants/subjects and can serve to challenge existing power structures that impinge on the lives of informants and ethnographers. (Sarah Pink, page 44, 2001)

In this understanding of the uses of video, Pink, along with others (Prosser, 2001; Lomax and Casey, 1998) agues that video ethnography can deepen our understandings of our research and provide another level of entry into understanding; our own position as researchers, the subject's position, and the complex layers of intersections that occur between representation, reality, culture and meaning.