What I love about revisiting well-loved works is how we see and experience the piece differently based on the new moment of passing we are in. In keeping with the idea of audiencing, I also realized that the context in which we read the piece (most of the time, the class we are in and our classmates) shapes how we read the piece and what we take away from it. Reading Wendy’s work this week, I was struck with the ideas of agency, caring and temporality.
One of the ideas that kept popping up for me is the balance between seeing kids as agentic social actors while also recognizing their vulnerability and dependence on adults for survival. This echoed Gene’s words in his art books he brought last week. How do we hold this balance of agency and vulnerability in our work, both for the kids (and adults) with whom we work, but also…for ourselves? I appreciated this line from A Camera is a Big Responsibility: “I want to urge that when we conduct photography projects with young people, we do so with a selfconscious effort to incorporate them as producers, interpreters, circulators, exhibitors and social analysts of their own and each other’s images.” It expands the ways in which we bring kids into our work. It isn’t just about them taking pictures but about them being involved across a project; it’s about honoring their voices as agentic enough to interpret and analyze their work also. This is a shift from research that takes a surface level approach to kids’ photography, just asking them to create data but then leaving the “higher-level” analysis to the adult researcher.
Of course, this stance requires not only respect for kids but also care. This idea was not only entangled throughout the three readings but also in the work of Gene and Victoria, who studied with Wendy. I kept thinking about the idea of how, as doctoral students, we are drawn to specific scholars, not just for their content area work but also for their stance and way of being in the world. Gene, Victoria and Wendy have written deeply thoughtful analyses of their own place in the research and in thinking through ways to honor their participants and center their voice, not just in the research process but in the world. I feel that same sense of care in our class as a whole and wonder about ways to bring that flow of care throughout our other classes that may not feel as deeply rooted in love and respect for ourselves, for others and for different ways of being in the world. What does it mean when, as researchers, we center ways of caring that kids express? What does it do when we highlight explicitly in our writing care for our participants as a stance? How does naming this amorphous and affective idea of caring in an often left-brained “intellectual” field change those who are reading the piece?
Temporality was also a theme that threaded through the different readings for me though I am still grappling with how to wrap my head around it. I am specifically thinking about Gabriel / Juan and the way he was drawn to images of his younger self and the young women (or girls) in Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds who expressed themselves across dimensions of time. I am intrigued by the way that arts-based research gives us more space for being fluid with time and thinking nonlinearly. For exploring the liminal spaces between and across time. For creating room for the imaginary as Lamar’s work invites us to do.
so much to think about…looking forward to our discussion!
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