Video as a mediational ecology: evidence, authority and pedagogical design in male youth sport

Video-based feedback is now routine in performance coaching, yet its pedagogical significance cannot be inferred from replay itself. Research shows that video practices vary in purpose, facilitation, interactional organisation and institutional meaning. What remains less clearly theorised is how video-mediated encounters organise epistemic participation: who determines what becomes evidence, whose interpretations count and whose accounts can affect what happens next. This conceptual paper develops video as a mediational ecology rather than as an intervention with predictable pedagogical effects. It distinguishes three analytically separable forms of authority: representational authority, concerning what is constituted as relevant evidence; interpretive authority, concerning whose accounts can legitimately establish its meaning; and consequential authority, concerning whose contributions are recognised as eligible to influence subsequent inquiry or pedagogical action. It further defines consequential epistemic participation as the situated exercise of that recognised capacity within a particular encounter. This distinction separates standing to matter from the encounter-level enactment of that standing. Male youth sport is treated as a contingent gendered context in which uncertainty, disagreement, expertise and visible error may acquire different social meanings, rather than as a homogeneous masculine culture. The framework rejects both technological determinism and pedagogical solutionism. One distinctive affordance of video is the persistent revisability of selected audiovisual representations of performance; how that representational possibility becomes educationally consequential depends on the social organisation of evidence, authority and participation around it.