Abstract:
Education for a social just world calls for attention to not only whose voices can be heard and count, but also how we conceptualise voice in educational research and practice. This paper I draw on the concept of response-ability and a more-than-human relational ontology of emergence (Kuokkanen, 2007; Barad, 2007/2012; Kimmerer, 2013) to make sense of the unexpected turns in my engagement with photos taken by student research participants. The paper thus intersects and contribute to the growing bodies of literature on response-able approaches to educational research and visual research methodologies. The photos were taken as part of a research project with a school for boys who have been excluded from mainstream schooling, mainly due to non-compliant behaviour. This project amongst others involved participating students taking photos of places and things that matter to how they feel about school and their sense of belonging in school. Though examples of my entangled engagements with the photos, I argue for a response-able approach to visual research that is accountable to the more-than-human entangled affective-material-discursive processes through which knowledge and notions of voice and agency are produced. I argue that such an affective and embodied engagement with photos in analysing research ‘data’ allows for making sense of and articulating knowledges that would not otherwise be possible. It brings forth stories of those we conventionally consider participants as well as researchers, audiences, and other-than-human by productively exposing otherwise unarticulated entanglements across time, space and matter. Through this, the photos become more-than student photos for student voice. They become entry points for engaging in constitutive conversation with the more-than human world we are of across spacetimematter, which allow for multiple knowledges and agencies to emerge. This emphasises that these concepts are never singular but always plural and emerging through mutual negotiation and enable an in-depth accounting for the creation of knowledges, voices, and agencies in visual research. As such, it facilitates a deepened accountability for the worlding we contribute to through the choices of mattering we make when engaging with the visual in educational research, policy and practice.