Video diaries enable ethnographers to build relationships of trust with participants, because they create empathic encounters between ethnographers and participants (Pink 2017). In our project on the professional development of teachers, video diaries created encounters with teachers and their entanglements with teaching, reflecting institutional roles, personal professional values, and the processes in which these aspects are negotiated. This paper elaborates on what we have found to be three core elements of our video diary approach (Wieser 2015): (1) Video diaries decenter participants as objects of inquiry through technological means, and create a space for self-representation in which participants can actively document their lives (Bates 2013). Video diaries can be described as “unselective inscription devices” (Pinchevski 2012), which capture streams of consciousness over time, but also tacit knowing beyond consciousness (Zundel et al. 2018). Even though researchers remain co-producers of video diaries, participants gain autonomy with respect to the focus they set in their diaries, which allows researchers to co-experience the often open, leaky, and emergent entanglements of practice. (2) Video diaries give insights into the tacit experiences of participants within the continuous flow of everyday life. While conventional fieldwork strategies such as casual conversations and interviewing give participants a vis-à-vis, video diaries create a more private space of sharing, and may provide a channel to say what cannot be said in social encounters (Cashmore et al. 2010). Video diaries thus allow insights into private spheres, and into fragments of the self that are revealed through glimpses into homes, private workspaces, or gardens, in which participants process experiences and relate their selves to professional decisions. (3) Video diaries create a way of empathizing with participants, becoming closely familiar with their point of view beyond observing and participating (Jones 2015). Empathising here refers to the generative outcome of a relationship of trust with participants that was built over time through an affective engagement with their experiences and perspectives. Video diaries create continual communication with participants, across fields, and give access to unmitigated comments on field relations and tensions, in which teachers can elaborate on their professional roles. The presentation draws on our fieldwork experiences and theoretical reflections on video diaries to initiate a conversation on the benefits and possibilities and risks of video diaries and their possible uses in educational ethnography.

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