Visual Anthropology as a Framework for Photographic Engagement Analysis

• In Event: 41.081 - Pedagogical Implications of Multimodal Pedagogy: Findings From the Reimagining Futures Project

Abstract

The present essay explores the potential relevance of the methodologies surrounding Visual Anthropology to multimodal workshops in which young people engage in composing processes. By positing that their photographic production can generate important issues around authorship, play and counter-storytelling, this work aims to provide a potential methodological pathway to understand the photographic production of participants in other research projects.
The first strategy to navigate the photographic corpus was to ask which one of them could be considered an anthropological photography, a term coined by Edwards and referenced by Pink (2013, p.67) to speak about any photography that can “give the researcher useful visual information” The photographs that were discarded were those who could not be framed at a descriptive level due to lack of clarity. After this first reduction, the remaining photographs were coded at a descriptive level, following three different categories: the space (inside or outside), the subject of the photography and the actions involved.
This first coding aimed to remain at a descriptive level in order to follow the methodology suggested by Wissman, Staples, Vasudevan and Nichols (2015). This initial coding allowed the photographies to be categorized in clusters based on the activities that they depicted.
The second layer of analysis aimed to think about the framework that the Reimagining Futures team has constructed to understand the work within the workshops. “How within alternative education spaces in particular, the arts and a multimodal sensibility can foreground creativity and cultivate a more complex understanding of relationships and belonging between learners and their environments” (Vasudevan and DeJaynes, p. 16, 2013).
Among the categories that emerged from the descriptive analysis, it appeared that many of the verbs involved interactions between people mediated by digital technologies. These visual artifacts also displayed patterns of collaboration, as many of them depicted groups of people engaged in conversations in informal clothing. The people in the photographs appeared to be of multiple age groups and did not display any distinctive division of roles.
The data collected included photographies from one of the workshops in which the young people were invited to go in a community walk through the area where the ATDT is located. They were provided with cameras and encouraged to document anything that caught their attention (Park, 2013). The artifact production process in which the young people engaged in allowed them to have a meaningful space to engage without the pressure of a restrictive assignment. (Pahl and Rowsell, 2010).
Youth with experiences with the justice system can benefit from participating in multimodal spaces where play is considered a meaningful pedagogy practice (Vasudevan, 2011). Finding methodological approaches to understand their composing processes and visual media will allow their meaning-making processes to be known and perhaps shift the hegemonic deficit-based narratives that are generally assumed (Schwartz, 2013). The aim of this presentation will be to showcase how the flexible pedagogy of the Reimagining Futures team allowed a meaningful photographic engagement to occur.

Author

• Cristina Patricia Salazar Gallardo, Teachers College, Columbia University