Geographies of alcohol,drinking,and drunkenness through the lens of participatory video

Abstract

In this dialogue, we view geographies of alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness through the lens of participatory video and drawing on research within geographies of youth. We address participatory, visual research methods and ask how such methods might enable researchers to ask (a)new questions about familiar terrain, as proposed by Jayne and Valentine (2024). In so doing, we re-visit ethnographic participant-led video data from our research on youth and belonging more than a decade ago.

Introduction

In their thought-provoking article, Jayne and Valentine (2024) contend that geographies of alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness suffer from moralising, disciplining, normalising discourses. Therefore, they argue, ‘[i]t is vital that geographers seize the opportunities offered by developing new innovative and creative methodological strategies to look again at how we ask questions of longstanding topics’. Applying creative, innovative, and mixed methods can provide more ‘focused empirical accounts of heterogeneities and complexities of knowledges, practices, materialities, emotional, embodied, affective experiences and performances’ (Jayne and Valentine, 2024) associated with alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness.

In this commentary, we explore how participatory video (PV) may offer opportunities for critical and reflexive interrogation of geographies of alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness. We ‘look again’ at a previous study to (1) illustrate how PV may help researchers slow down and take stock of the ways the social and the material worlds are inherently entangled (Cooren and Latour, 2010) and (2) to ask what other discourses we might offer when researching alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness with young people.

We re-visit video clips recorded as part of our participatory research with youths in rural Estonia on everyday places and practices of belonging. Drinking places and practices were not part of our research originally, but emerged through participant-led data collection. In the following, we re-view video clips from a birthday party recorded in 2010 by one of our male research participants.

Looking for/at practices, meanings, and materialities of alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness

We chose PV in our project because of its ‘potential to rupture and transform hierarchical power relations’ (Kindon, 2003, in Blazek, 2017: 247). PV offered our participants an inviting and motivating engagement with the research topic as well as the opportunity to be more in the lead of the data generated within the project. Like Wilkinson (2018), we valued visual methodologies for offering participants an opportunity to show not only tell and put them more in charge. The visual data generated by youths, enabled us to get closer to lived, prereflective, immediate, sensuous, and felt experiences (Pink, 2006).

A participatory approach may provide researchers with insights into spaces (and events, materialities) that are meaningful but difficult for outsiders to access; in the case of our research, places in which alcohol is present and underage drinking and drunkenness happen (Trell et al., 2014). In a previous publication, we used video data to make sense of the geographies of alcohol and drinking of rural youth. Instead of viewing the video as an example of a daily place of belonging for youth, in which alcohol entered, we framed our analysis within a discourse of masculinity and problem drinking in Estonia (Trell et al., 2014). By doing that, rather than following the participants’ lead and exploring further the meaning of these places and practices within them, and rather than utilising the strength of this participant-led method to rupture power relations (Kindon, 2003), or integrate questions of epistemology (Blazek, 2017), we made youths visible as well as invisible.

Inspired by Jayne and Valentine (2024), a decade later, we draw on actor-network theory to re-view our video data. The availability of visual data enabled us to literally look anew, and in detail, at the scenes related to alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness in rural Estonia. We slowed down, paused, zoomed in, discussed, restarted our videos, and reflected on our re-view in relation to our analysis of what we witnessed before (Trell, 2013). We now explore how youths use alcohol to create meaning, and how these meanings change relationally across spaces and times bringing us closer perhaps to what alcohol means to youths within their meaningful places.

Looking again at (un)familiar terrain

In our re-viewing of videos, we note that drinking practices emerge as fragmented and heterogeneous throughout the evening, different for the boys and girls present. Different scenes illustrate boys taking shots of strong alcohol together, giving a toast (shouting ‘all together’), or drinking beer from a can. Girls sip what seems like a mixed drink, through a straw from larger glasses. As the party progresses, boys dance and move around the room, while the girls sit still for most of the time the camera is on and are less visible in the scenes (cf. Measham, 2002). The boys dress up and down, performing in silly hats, taking off their shirts, and attempting to pull each other's pants down. Several scenes witness the boys making sexual moves either with gestures towards/on their own body or together with/towards other male bodies.

The scenes show that alcohol enables youths to ‘transgress the barriers and nervousness’ and is used ‘as an excuse for acting in certain ways’ (Demant, 2009: 35). As the party progresses, drunkenness seems to allow youth to ‘loosen up’ and alcohol is used as a way of producing social ‘sex’ (Measham, 2002). Alcohol as an ‘actant’ is making ‘some difference to a state of affairs’ (Latour, 2005: 52). In this safe space of the home, alcohol helps youths create a liminal space to express subjectivities between child, ‘not-child’ (topless dance, sexual movements), and adult as alcohol is associated with adulthood and matureness (Beauvais et al., 2001). At this party, then, alcohol is invited as a way of socialisation and takes part as a desirable participant, ‘working with the people to create meaning’ and a party mood (Hoops, 2012: 4).

It is important to note that the materialities at hand in the home-space afford youths this opportunity for ‘controlled loss of control’ (Measham, 2002: 335–73). The scenes also show that while alcohol is controlling youth, they themselves have prepared for this ‘take over’. They established rules about not spilling alcohol on furniture, there is a soft bed for passing out, a bucket is placed to collect vomit, there is care by peers, or a caretaker will return, someone may call an ambulance (as has happened), someone might clean up. The scenes from the party, including the rules, attributes, knowledges about potentially remaining safe, all illustrate, as Demant (2009: 32) noted ‘drinking is central to making [these] boys and girls stand out as mature’. However, alcohol and drinking is not regarded by youths at all times as a desirable kind of maturity.

In the last video fragments, we re-view an interaction between the boys, who exited the house in search of more alcohol, and two older men sitting in front of a local grocery store, drinking. They lift up a plastic bottle towards the camera, showing they are drinking a strong, cheap beer, sold in large 1.5–2 litre bottles. A third man is passed out behind a garbage can. Compared to the house party, in this scene alcohol ‘enters the picture’ in a very different way. In this context, the presence of alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness are not associated with something cool, playful, and fun but rather as something to make fun of and feel sorry for. The boys make jokes about the man behind the garbage can and encourage the other men to ‘make humour’ for the camera, while the men label themselves ‘village drunks’ and appear embarrassed, attempting to hide their face from the camera.

In a follow-up interview, some youths commented on this scene and referred to the local drunks as ‘the ones who have been unfortunate in life’ and, looking to their own future, argued that drinking heavily and losing control is a phase which they need to grow out of in order to mature. Alcohol in the discursive network of the problem drinkers and drinking (associated in particular with men in rural areas) was something that was framed by youths as undesirable (Trell, 2013). The boys and girls in our study reflected on their own behaviour and highlighted problems they connected to excessive drinking in the local community.

These reflections by youth imply they make an evaluation which is based on moral, ethical, and political grounds indicating a link to citizenship studies. Here, we see an entry point for a different discourse than used in our previous published work. While agency and everyday citizenship were important themes identified within the same research project (Trell, 2013), in our analysis and writing, the discussion on youth agency and everyday citizenship remained disconnected from the places of alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness, even though ‘the home’ was conceptualised as both – a place of everyday citizenship as well as a place of drinking and drunkenness.

Alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness have been discussed by researchers in relation to citizenship and youth to a limited extent, referring to how being legally allowed to buy alcohol is a part of a ‘rite of passage’ for young people and associated with ‘becoming’ an adult (Beauvais et al., 2001). There is little attention for questions regarding agency. Yet, drawing on ANT, researchers like Demant (2009: 43) emphasised that ‘[p]aying attention to the matters of concern of the people in the networks would probably make research recognisable by, and more sensitive to, the people in question and in this way form a route to harm-prevention strategies that might be taken more seriously by teenagers’. An example of such a strategy could be, as Lyk et al. (2020) demonstrate, a virtual reality application for youth to help them recognise and handle peer pressure in relation to drinking alcohol.

Conclusion

Jayne and Valentine (2024) argue that ‘[i]t is vital that geographers seize the opportunities offered by developing new innovative and creative methodological strategies to look again at how we ask questions of longstanding topics’. Based on our experience using participatory video to explore meaningful everyday places and practices (including drinking places and practices) with young people, we discussed this method as potentially valuable for geographers for better understanding the complexity of practices and meanings associated with alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness. Participant-led video provides researchers an opportunity to witness and indirectly access certain places and practices related to alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness, which they would otherwise have no access to. In addition, it captures many nuances and can help detecting and understanding how social and material worlds are inherently entangled and in a constant process of becoming (Cooren and Latour, 2010). Recent work in other disciplines proposing so-called ‘assemmethodology’ (a combination of assemblage theory and ethnomethodology), addressing actor-network theory and alcohol in relation to visual qualitative data analysis (Wright, 2016) or introducing sociomaterial approaches to ethnography to reveal novel perspectives (MacLeod et al., 2019) promising for furthering geographies of alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness.

On a critical note, when working with PV on ‘ethically complicated’ topics such as alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness (Gillen, 2016: 588), it is critical to carefully consider the ethical aspects of the research, which may be a rather lengthy process (see Trell, 2013; Blazek, 2017 for a detailed reflection). Furthermore, it is relevant to acknowledge the role of the camera as an additional ‘actant’ and the influence this may have on performances of drinking and drunkenness. Oldrup and Carstensen (2012), for example, conceptualise visual methods (in particular photography) as forms of social action pointing to the relevance of researchers being aware of how an image is produced in relation to norms for everyday practice and sociocultural codes and genres. Indeed, in the video clips we re-viewed, comments were made about images ending up on YouTube. At times, when the camera was filming, the boys attempted to do something ‘silly’, for example, pretend to throw up. Thus, while the video may render certain materialities and practices surrounding alcohol, drinking, and drunkenness visible, a camera may also distort practices.