Video Ethnography Lab

"Endure to be seen by those who can see." - Paul Ledford, on the opening of the lab

Background and Movies

On 20 October 2011 the Video Ethnography Laboratory was officially established in Stubbs Hall as a resource for graduate teaching and video ethnographic research. The fully-equipped facility contains several iMac computers and a full complement of stabilizers, lights, microphones, and mixers. A state of the art tape backup facility (Cache-A) is shared by the Louisiana State Museum for digital archiving. The goal of the Video Lab is to provide a new variety of qualitative research training for interested graduate students.

Video ethnography is the video recording of the stream of activity of subjects in their natural setting, in order to experience, interpret, and represent culture and society. It is commonly used in the fields of visual anthropology, visual sociology, and cultural studies.

The Video Ethnography Lab at LSU organizes the Ethnografilm Festival each April in Paris, France.

The Lab also collaborates on a journal of ethnographic film (Editor in Chief, Dr. Gregory Scott, DePaul University). Please visit the web site of the Journal of Video Ethnography.

In addition, the laboratory provides technical assistance and filming for the National Library of Scotland, to create the first-of-its-kind archive of English-language performance art in the world, the Fringe Performance Archive.

The video ethnography lab is run by Dr. Wesley Shrum.

Dr. Shrum's Ten Commandments for Academic Life