I recently had the pleasure of attending the 5th International Symposium on Education and Visuality.
The symposium was organized by the research group Cultura visual e educaçao, which brings together faculty members from universities in Brazil and Urugay:
- Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil
- Universidade de Brasília, Brazil
- Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brazil
- Universidade de la República, Uruguay
- Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Brazil
- Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
The three days we spent in Montevideo brought together work by faculty and graduate students that inquired in areas of visual culture studies, expanding on projects that draw on social theory in art education, visual-lead research, or critical pedagogy.
This year the symposium’s theme was Educational Research in Hyper-Visual Contexts. To address this topic, my keynote presentation focused on the epistemological implications of the visual in our research practices.
The paper I presented, titled Researching at the borders of representation: An examination of the hyper-visual in educational research [Indagar desde los márgenes de la representación: Una examinación del hiper-visual en la investigación educativa], posits that the hyper-visual can be understood as the image that is always already more than visual data, a system of relations rather than a two-dimensional photograph.
I revisited several moments from a participatory research with teens to explore the extent to which the visual was not a tool used by the teens to represent their experiences, but rather a performatic gesture that interacted with our modes of knowing and living in the world.
