The Interpretive Imagination Forum

Abstract

This article reports on a study that engaged graduate students from one Canadian university in a knowledge creation project, which produced new evidence and insights regarding pressing socio-political issues of our time. This study resulted in the creation of an instructional application known as the IIF (the Interpretive Imagination Forum), a collaborative video research application for use in higher education courses across the disciplines (e.g., anthropology, history, media studies, philosophy, queer studies, sociology, women's studies). Further, this study resulted in the development of a technology-mediated, hermeneutic tagging technique. IIF was developed as an open-source platform for conducting video research. In keeping with open-source curriculum objectives (OSC), a curriculum framework was developed, which can be used in graduate-level courses (e.g., curriculum foundations, qualitative methodology, critical inquiry). Student participants were invited to add, delete, and modify text annotations or tags, which not only resulted in broader understandings of the themes, theories, and concepts that existed within the videotaped content, but also resulted in the development of a creative and innovative instructional and learning tool. The overarching objective of this study was to circumvent linear or normative qualitative analysis and instead facilitate non-linear, creative, and organic approaches to understanding, analyzing, representing, and disseminating theories and concepts derived from video scholarship.