What am I as a researcher?

Just wrote this on the discussion forum for the 'Practice-led ...' course I'm doing. It was quite enlightening to unpack who I am and why I know what I know -

Two things come to mind immediately when I ask myself this question which highlight my interpretivist approach. Firstly, living in a university world I am creating documentaries in a research context as opposed to a commercial context. This has a huge impact on the kind of work I produce. The focus in industry is on audience and sales. My focus is on exploration and innovation. A commercial doco maker has probably never heard of the leading critical thinkers of doco theory: Nichols, Corner etc whereas they are a cornerstone of my knowledge and therefore influence my productions.

Secondly, my social/cultural construct influences my view of what documentary is and what its purpose is. Being a teenager in the 1990s meant that popular documentary to me was a mix of fact and fiction (docudramas, reality TV) so I'm quite accepting of these types of doco whereas older generations aren't. Growing up in a middle class, Australian context means that to me, the purpose of documentary is to tell stories whereas for someone growing up in perhaps, lower classes of anywhere, Middle East, Africa or any other setting where it was a struggle to live then the importance of documentary as a tool for social issue commentary might be more important.