The Camera Is an Engine: Ways of Seeing Perspective, Context and Reflexivity to Make and Shape Markets through Innovative Research Practice

This chapter explores the performative power of research methods, and specifically the power of audio-visual technologies – the video camera - in capturing and re-presenting data concerning markets, their innovation and transformation. Our claim is that cameras and their research outputs, are engines of change. They act as market-making devices that not only inform but additionally perform markets. After reflecting on the Market Studies conceptualization of markets and the role of the camera as a market-making device, we show how the camera provides new perspectives, generates a deeper understanding of context and opens-up new opportunities for the reflexive action that has the power to transform both our understandings of markets and how they are performed. We draw on our own experiences and extant research to consider how the camera acts as a socio-technical and sentimental device to shake up existing practices, generating opportunities for new data collection, analysis and new ways of seeing, representing and expressing the politics of markets – transforming them in the process. We argue that i) zooming-out, ii) zooming-in, iii) refocusing, iv) slowing-down action and motion, and v) editing, have the capacity to generate and reveal different constitutive components of a market's sociomaterial realities by drawing attention to actors, objects and emotions, and their relations with their wider social setting. We conclude that cameras can constitute different realities, breaking down taken for granted binaries, between society and nature, opening opportunities to build moral markets in new and innovative ways.