becoming cyborg Activist Filmmaker, the Living Camera, Participatory Democracy, and Their Weaving M. Francyne Huckaby Abstract This article explores the chimeric hybridity of portable camera, sound recorder, filmmaker, and audience as research and activist cyborg weaving. Situating filmmaking in critical qualitative, ethnographic, and sociological traditions, I share my journey into becoming woman and machine—cine-eye-ear—in the struggle for continued access to public education. Throughout this article I use lowercase letters to deemphasize the importance of the individualized human in cyborg connection. Keywords: cyborg, film, arts-based inquiry, critical qualitative research I am the cine-eye, I am the mechanical eye, I am the machine that shows you the world as only a machine can see it. From now on, I will be liberated from immobility. I am in perpetual movement. I draw near to things, I move myself away from them, I enter into them, I travel toward the snout of a racing horse. (Dziga Vertov, as cited in Rouch, 1973, p. 3) My eye attunes to the digital lens; my ear surveys the soundscape. Less concerned with what I see and hear, my senses assimilate to the technology that records and re-creates light, moving images, and sound. I was content carefully crafting text, images, and poetics. But with a machine integrating into my being (Haraway, 2004), we become the participatory camera (Luc de Heusch, as cited in Rouch, 1973), the cine-eye-ear (Rouch, 1973): cyborg. The cyborg for Donna Haraway (2004) is at the center of her ‘‘ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism’’ (p. 7). By attending to irresolvable contradictions, Haraway (2004) holds incompatible, assumed dichotomies in tension together—human/machine, female/male, human/animal, physical/nonphysical (Stevenson, 2007). In offering this myth, Haraway reveals the potential, particularly for women, for powerful alliances, coalitions, and couplings formed through affinity instead of identity. Such alliances are possible for cyborgs, who long for connections and have no myths of origins. To International Review of Qualitative Research, Vol. 10, No. 4, Winter 2017, pp. 340–359. ISSN 1940-8447, eISSN 1940-8455.  2017 International Institute for Qualitative Research, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. All rights reserved. Request permission to photocopy or reproduce article content at the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2017.10.4.340.