Thinking, Feeling, Creating with Photography: Widening the Lens of Visual Research in Education

Thinking, Feeling, Creating with Photography: Widening the Lens of Visual Research in Education

Presented by the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society

This event will take place in-person and will also be live-streamed over Zoom.

This talk engages scholarly understandings of photography in educational research. Building on the works of artists, arts-based researchers, and interdisciplinary scholarship on visual research, Vellanki shares his theoretical and methodological explorations with photographic inquiry through a focus on aesthetics, stories, and communities. This approach, he argues, expands conceptualizations of visual research by interweaving the indexical/imaginary, art/data, and fact/fiction. Drawing on his ongoing work, The Passport Photo Project, he traces the history of passport photos and their role in the lives of racially and ethnically minoritized peoples. The project reshapes collective understandings of these bureaucratic objects through collaborative artmaking with immigrants and refugees. Taken together, this talk will demonstrate the multifarious possibilities for photography as theory, method, and artistic practice, while also drawing attention to the ethical and methodological questions that are yet to be addressed by educational researchers as we see drastic shifts in the role of the visual in our everyday lives.