Burton is a practice-based researcher in personal documentary film and photography. His doctoral research titled 'Provenance in Personal Documentary: My Mother's Village' traverses scholarly work in media art, art history, cultural studies, and ethnography. My Mother's Village (2014) is a feature length documentary film that revisits a series of ethnographic films made in Sri Lanka in the late 1970s by Burton’s parents, and results in a fascinating intergenerational study across three transformative decades from civil war to globalisation, and a reflexive meta-narrative on how the act of representation has similarly transformed. Burton’s interest in experimental ethnography extends to a collaborative documentary film with professors Stephen Muecke and Michael Taussig titled ‘Sunset Ethnography’(2014), in which the filmmaking attempts to enact unconventional ideas around ethnographic fieldwork. Burton’s current research explores visual representations of the Anthropocene and environmental crises. He is currently exploring the potential of unmanned imaging technologies to provide a non-anthropocentric and trans-disciplinary narrative to our place within the natural environment.