Monday, October 29, 2007

TRANSLOCALITIES/TRANSMODERNITIES

Our interest is in pluralizing the understanding of visual practices in transnational cultural formations in order to facilitate new, intersectional and relational connections between communities, histories and discourses.
Possible topics include:

• What are the emerging opportunities for reconfiguring translocal sodalities?
• What are the terms of the context that the globalized art world creates for visual artists in sites of geo-political and cultural alterity?
• What marks current global trends of critiques of power across visual systems?
• What are the discursive limits of art criticism and other disciplinary knowledges for critically engaging emerging translocal practices?
• How visual artists in the Global South have used the possibilities of the art world circuits and discourses of international biennials to question normative descriptions of democracy and produce new political visions.

1 comment:

richard Johnson said...

The Language of Imperialism in Teacher Education:
Subjugation and the Visual Teacher

Rich Johnson, University of Hawai’i
I am alarmed at how rapidly bodies like mine have been alternatively positioned, repositioned, and further disposition-ed and further dispossessed. My caregiver body which so willingly and graciously provided warm, consoling, and deliberate caring touch(es) and compassion to those in my charge now appears to be a body with “unruly subjectivity,” a body that Holiday and Hassard (2001) would suggest is:
…coded as in need of (physical) control [and] this coded body is reflected back on the subject’s mind, as in need of (psychological) control. This process is at the heart of imperialist and patriarchal imperatives that sought to keep unruly subjects in their place (p. 9-10).
How did it get to be that way?
I’m struck then with considering my body’s newfound, altered status, that active placement in a particular subjugated position whereby it has been conquered, dominated under the control of another. In her historical work, Mary Douglas noted (1966/9) that that “which is ‘in-between’, which crosses conceptual boundaries, is dealt with by societies as impure, contaminated and risky to their integrity” (1966, p. 36). To me, when I look at the photographic evidence and place that alongside another body, that body of personal evidence-memories I’ve shared here and elsewhere, I’m dumbfounded about my newfound foreign stature, stature reminiscent of Kristeva’s (1994) notion of “that which does not fit.”
The few images shared so far are offered here as they’ve proven helpful in assisting me with visualizing important aspects of my identity and subjectivity, about critical clinical practices as a teacher and parent. They help me to deconstruct how I’ve located myself within this complicated–because I choose to make it so, narrative. By critically engaging and deconstructing several images, by (re)looking critically, questioning, re)positioning my own subjectivity and identity, by “employing an active, constructive gaze” (Dykstra, 1995, p. 7) I’ve been able to make better sense of images that heretofore were of no intrigue or interest to me or the field of early education. My intent here is to incorporate visual cultural inquiry in “an exploration by the visual, through the visual, of human sociality, a field of social action which is enacted in planes of time and space through objects and bodies, landscapes and emotions, as well as thought” (Banks, 1998, p. 19).
The theoretical underpinnings that the overwhelming majority of early educators are familiar with ground us pragmatically in the visual and assist me personally in theoretically critiquing notions of the impact of visual culture theory on the field of early childhood education, both historically and currently. In much of my recent theoretical work (Johnson, 2005; Johnson & Moniz, 2006) I’ve incorporated critical visual culture perspectives in an effort to assist me in critically understanding the vast extent to which the world we live in is an “increasingly image-saturated society where paintings, photographs, and electronic images depend on one another for their meanings” (Sturken & Cartwright, 2001, pgs. 10-11).
The cultural formations we inhabit have become intensified, saturated by visual images with a multitude of purposes and intended effects. After initially engaging a moderate amount of visual culture theory (e.g., Johnson, 2003), I now more clearly see and understand the personal links to visual culture in my professional work across time, again, not unlike most of us in the early childhood education field.
Much like Spence’s (1988) critical work, Putting Myself in the Picture, (1988) I too wish to “reconfigure…[so that] out of the broken pieces of the self will come a subjectivity that acknowledges the fragmentation process, but [that] encompasses and embraces the parts and brings them into dialogue with each other" (Spence, 1988, p.66). My interests here and elsewhere are very much aligned with critically engaging “constructions of the body in a variety of other discourses and analyze the construction of my own identity through photographic images” (Dykstra, 1995, p. 7).
Methodologies for making sense of the educational world
This critique coincides with Bal’s (2001) understandings that “subjectivity is formed by perpetual adjustment of images passing before the subject, who makes them into a whole that is comprehensible because it is continuous” (p. 5). Through critical readings of several photographs and other images and artifacts in this collected montage, my aim here is to use multiple interactional analyses (deconstructive techniques and visual culture techniques) to assist in the critique of these presented visual images (Mirzoeff, 1999). I’m intrigued by interrogating a variety of images and the realization that my own personal interpretation and other interpretations of the meaning of these particular texts bring multiple meanings to the understandings of these images (Lather, 1998).
I’m attempting to assist efforts to destabilize and dismantle normative, imperialist legacies in early childhood education (Cannella, 2005; Johnson, 2005) and to create new spaces that value cultural and theoretical plurality and hybridity (Pajaczkowska, 2001). I chose photographs as a research tool because of my personal interest in visual cultural methodologies and because photographs have a rich history in other related disciplines (i.e, anthropology and sociology) even though they are not as popular in educational research (Prosser, 1998; Taylor, 2002).
By incorporating a form of personalized phototherapy (Schwartzenberg, 2005) the intent of ‘putting myself into the picture’ (Spence, 1988) here is to interrogate both personalized photographs taken of me and children and photographs of children from advertised educational products that I’ve interacted with more of late than those personal images (Harper, Knowles, & Leonard, 2005). This work mirrors Spence’s pivotal narrative work and Weiser’s (2005) phototherapy work whereby she claims that when “clients encounter the feelings, thoughts, and memories their own photos evoke in them, they are usually able to then better understand, express, and resolve their problem—and begin to explore the underlying feelings and background reasons involved” (p. 6). The systematic revisiting and presentation of these photographs will also entail a personalized form of the photo-elicitation process whereby I’ll explore, via the photographs, personalized belief sets, values, attitudes, and further meanings whilst triggering memories (Harper, 2005; Prosser, 1998) by visually narrating a part(s) of my life (Harper, Knowles & Leonard, 2005).
References
Bal, M. (2001). Looking in: The art of viewing. Australia: G & B Arts.
Banks, M. (1998). Visual anthropology: Image, object and interpretation. In J. Prosser (Ed.), Image-based research. PA: Falmer Press.
Burgin, V. (2000). In/different spaces: Place and memory in visual culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cannella, G. (2005). Reconceptualizing the field (of early care and education): If ‘western’ child development is a problem, then what do we do? In N. Yelland (Ed.), Critical issues in early childhood education (pp. 17-39). UK: Open University Press.
Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Dykstra, J. (1995). Putting herself in the picture: autobiographical images of illness and the body. Afterimage. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_m2479/is_n2_ v23/ai_17789645/pg_7, Retrieved November 3, 2006).
Harper, D., Knowles, C., & Leonard, P. (2005). Visually narrating post-colonial lives: Ghosts of war and empire. Visual Studies, 20 (1), 4-15.
Holliday, R., & Hassard, J. (2001). Contested bodies. New York: Routledge.
Johnson, R. (2005, October). The language of imperialism in early education: Subjugation and the visual child. Paper presented at the Annual Conference on Reconceptualizing Research in Early Schooling: Research, Theory and Practice, Madison, Wisconsin.
Johnson, R. (2005). ’Civilization of replicas’: Disrupting multicultural pretend play props. In N. Yelland (Ed.), Critical issues in early childhood education, (pp. 163-177). UK: Open University Press.
Johnson, R., & Moniz, J. (2006, April). (de/re)Colonization of progressive teacher education: Interpreting normative practices through visual culture analyses. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA.
Kristeva, J. (1994). Strangers to ourselves. (Trans. By Leon S. Roudiez). New York: Columbia University Press.
Lather, P. (1998). Staying dumb? Feminist research and pedagogy within the postmodern. In H. Simons and M. Billig (Eds.), After postmodernism: Reconstructing ideology critique (pp. 101-132). Thousand Oaks, SAGE.
Mirzoeff, N. (1999). An introduction to visual culture. New York: Routledge. Pajaczkowska, C. (2001). Issues in feminist visual culture. In F. Carson & C. Pajaczkowska (Eds.), Feminist visual culture. New York: Routledge.
Prosser, J. (1998). Image-based research. London: Falmer Press.
Schwartzenberg, S. (2005). The personal archive as historical record. Visual Studies, 20 (1), 70-82.
Spence, J. (1988). Putting myself in the picture. Seattle: The Real Comet Press.
Taylor, E. W. (2002). Using still photography in making meaning of adult educators’ teaching beliefs. Studies in the Education of Adults, 34 (2), 123-139.
Weiser, J. (2005). Remembering Jo Spence: A brief personal and professional memoir…