Abstract
This chapter maps the issues and tensions, theoretical and methodological, to which this book responds. The author describes her own experiences as a visual art pedagogue in a notoriously violent and impoverished South Bronx Junior High School. Through this ethnographic tale, she begins to contextualise the need for educational research in the area of youth identities and visual material culture (VMC). In particular, Eglinton underlines a disconnection between youth cultural experiences, theory, pedagogy, and empirical studies that examine young people’s use of VMC. Drawing on Hall’s (The local and the global: globalization and ethnicity. In McClintock A, Mufti A, Shohat E (eds) Dangerous liaisons: gender, nation, and post-colonial perspectives. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp 173–187, 1997a) global postmodern, and place or locality as a key conceptual tool, the author argues for a more relational understanding of youth engagement with VMC: one involving youth experiences, VMC, and the social and physical geographies young people live with/in and through. In the second part of this chapter, the focus turns to methodology: the author refers to ‘new’ ethnographies (e.g. in Lather PA, Postmodernism, post-structuralism and post (critical) ethnography: of ruins, aporias and angels. In Atkinson P, Coffey A, Delamont S, Lofland J, Lofland L (eds) Handbook of ethnography. Sage, London, pp 477–492, 2001) and describes the ‘multi-sited’ (Marcus G, Ethnography through thick and thin. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998), participatory, visual-based ethnography used in this study; particular attention is paid to visual-based methods as well as to issues around authority and representation. The author concludes with the aims and outline of the book.
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Notes
- 1.
A portion of this chapter has been previously published in Eglinton (2008).
- 2.
Junior high schools in the United States serve students between elementary and high school. Grades included vary between 6th and 9th grade.
- 3.
Though this number might seem high, I was only one of three art teachers in a school with 5,000 students. One art educator worked with 1,000 or so special needs students, and two of us worked with 4,000 remaining pupils. I taught 6 classes per day with approximately 33 young people in a class. I saw each class once a week for a term (approximately, 990 young people in a term). There were two terms in the school year, bringing the number of young people who walked through my door to around 1,980.
- 4.
- 5.
For clarity and brevity, I use the terms self/selves and identity/identities interchangeably. I do not, however, do this unreflectively and recognise there are literature and debates focusing on the relationship between self and identity (e.g. Fraser, 1999).
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
Names of all participants, community members, staff, and sites (except New York City and Yukon Territory more generally) have been changed.
- 10.
See also Hastrup and Olwig (1997) and Pink (2001). I contrast modernist and postmodern perspectives not because a sharp divide exists between them, nor to demonstrate a temporal picture, but rather to highlight differences in the kinds of ethnography. Fontana (1994, p. 220) writes: ‘What makes… ethnographies postmodern is often a matter of degree and interpretation’. Though this research finds its home in interdisciplinarity, the approach used in this study focuses heavily, though not exclusively, on social and cultural anthropology. This does not mean that ethnography is exclusive to anthropology; Lather (2001, p. 477), for instance, describes ethnography as ‘transdisciplinary’.
- 11.
Overall, in this framework, I do not reject the idea that there dominant discourses which ‘take on a hard objectified character’ (Berger & Luckmann, 1967, in Filmer, Jenks, Seale, Thoburn, & Walsh, 2004), but I do use sociocultural theories to offer the idea that these discourses are constantly in flux as they are constituted of, and serve to constitute, the actions of people.
- 12.
See ‘Watching Myself, Watching Myself’ (http://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/index.php?id=457).
- 13.
I have also included a glossary of terms for slang used by young people and myself.
- 14.
For the PhD dissertation, I had approval to include some images from the Hope and did include some images featuring the youth. In order to conceal the young people’s identities, I blocked out faces and other identifying characteristics using various editing techniques. However, while I am able to show images in conferences and other live events, for wider print publication, I am unable to include these images. In addition, I did feel that the practice of blocking out the youths’ faces took away from the participants’ intentions and ownership of their cultural productions.
- 15.
Though youth selected pseudonyms used in the videos, by the end of the study, everyone knew each other’s names and I have changed the names again to strengthen confidentiality in the final text.
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Eglinton, K.A. (2013). Telling Stories, Forging Links, and Researching Lives. In: Youth Identities, Localities, and Visual Material Culture. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4857-6_1
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