Photography in Educational Scholarship: An Aesthetic Mode of Inventing the World

• In Event: 47.025 - Entangled Sensualities: Bodies, Arts, Aesthetics, and Beyond in Qualitative Methodologies

Abstract

As an image-making and representational practice, photography has appealed to educational scholars and researchers for many years. Photography and educational research and scholarly practices share several things in common. They are processes that seek out, record, and reveal what is often overlooked, or rarely seen. Educational researchers tend to use photography as a means for recording ‘objectively’ what seemingly exists in the world. Here, through a study of Nan Goldin’s, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, I explore the idea that photography can never record the world as it presents, but it does function as a form of world making. The act of making photographs serves as a mode of making contact with the world, of noticing and not noticing it.

Author

• Dónal O'Donoghue, The University of British Columbia