Reading the Visual in the Marketing of Elite Schooling

Abstract

In a provocative and engaging paper, Prosser (2008, p. 6) has argued that there is a ‘darker side of visual research’ which resists epistemic and methodological pluralism and favours prescriptive orthodoxies and boundary setting over flexibility, creativity and reflexivity. Illustrative of the more negative rendering of visual methods is, he argues, the prescriptions outlined by Emmison and Smith’s (2000, p. 110) Researching the Visual, including their claim that it is possible to ‘get by without’ talking to the people within and behind images. In this chapter, our aim is not to engage directly with Emmison and Smith’s (2000) thesis, given it has been elaborated upon and responded to by a range of visual studies scholars (e.g. Pink 2006; Henry 2012). Indeed, we wish to avoid the type of challenge/attack discourse that Prosser (2008) suggests sometimes characterises the field of visual research and rightly argues is unproductive. Rather than arguing that one approach needs to supplant another, we contend that what is needed is an openness to varied and multiple paradigms which are guided by our research questions and aims. Thus, in this chapter we build on work which has very usefully mapped the visual in elite schools, through interviews with the producers of these images; that is, marketing and communication managers. We argue that this is a group which represents an increasingly important set of actors in the educational landscape creating and shaping the images associated with schools, and thus mediating the discourses which they communicate.