Learning to Learn: Representation, Refusal, and the Ethical Encounter in Participatory Visual Research With Transnational Youth

• In Event: 65.080 - Roundtable Session 24
  In Roundtable Session: 65.080-16 - Eyeing Curriculum Studies at the Crossroads of Decolonizing, Transnational, and Indigenous Inquiry

Abstract

This paper explores the two authors’ respective and joint process of what Spivak calls “learning to learn from below” in the context of participatory visual research work with transnational youth. Thinking with Spivak, we critically engage with our complicities with/in visual research as a an academic practice which remains an imperial task of knowledge production. Herein, learning to learn focuses specifically on the hyper-self-reflexive process of critical inhabitation of multiple practices of representation (e.g., representation_political, representation_semiotic), as well as strategic and productive practices of partial refusal (i.e., refusing problematic representations, but not refusing representation outright).

Authors

• Marc Roderick Higgins, The University of British Columbia

• Masayuki Iwase, The University of British Columbia