Sites of Alternative Engagement: Claiming Relationality as a Methodology Activated by Visuality

• In Event: Thinking Ourselves “Out of” and “Into” Visual Research Methodologies in Education

Abstract

This paper will present findings from a visual and sound-based research study that investigated place-cultures and place-making practices in independent boys’ schools in Ireland and Canada. Akhil Gupta (1992) describes place-making as ‘the structures of feeling that bind space, time, and memory in the production of location’ (p.76). Place cultures is a term used to stand for the behaviors, beliefs, values, symbols, and artifacts that a place generates, and are generated in, through, and because of a place. The research investigates the place-making practices of a range of school-users in an effort to better understand ‘for whom’ and ‘by whose agency’ places are made (Lefebvre 1991). Knowing that visual research can never lay claim to an authoritative knowledge, and motivated by the question, what forms of knowing are constituted in the act of looking, the performance of seeing, and the process of recalling, describing, analyzing and critiquing those very acts which occur in a given moment under particular conditions, the paper will:
(i) Consider the “sites of alternative engagements” that visual research methodologies afford
(ii) Explore what it might mean to claim relationality as a methodology activated by visuality.

Perspectives/Theoretical Framework: The research from which this paper draws is influenced by what has been termed the ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences (Gieryn 2000; Warf & Arias, 2008). The ‘spatial turn’ is intellectually grounded in the notion that space is a product and precondition of all our practices, encounters and engagements with the world (Massey 2004). This research aligns with a growing and renewed interest in theorizing space in postmodernist and feminist theory (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997; Anzaldua 1987; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Foucault 1982).

Methods and Data Sources: Thomas Gieryn (2000) says, “Maybe a place-sensitive sociology is not a set of empirical findings at all or even a distinctive kind of explanatory model, but rather a way to do sociology in a different key – a visual key” (p.483). Following Gieryn (2000), three primary research methods were used in this research: (i) visual methods – including documentary photography, documentary film-making, photo-elicitation, and photo-voice; (ii) sound-based methods – whereby participants record the sounds of schooling; and (iii) semi-structured individual and group interviews.

Results: During, and as a result of conducting this research, I have become increasingly interested in the unspoken and unquantifiable relational potential of, and the potential of the relational in visual research. Following Mieke Bal (2003), I have found that we never encounter the visual in isolation from other senses; visual research is never purely visual? Yet something happens when people look, and something emerges from that act of looking. It is by paying attention to the quality of this process (which involves making choices, making decisions, making sense) that the power of visual research lies unrealized.

Scholarly Significance: These findings have the potential to significantly inform and shape the ongoing development of visual research methodologies. In addition, this research has the potential to profoundly influence and change how places are produced, organized and managed in schools.

Author

• Donal O'Donoghue, The University of British Columbia