Nowadays, schools are living challenges around responding to students' differences (OIM, 2019). Educational communities ask for pedagogical strategies that engage with cultural, social and gender configurations that their students embody (MiCreate, outcoming, p.82).  The ongoing PhD thesis “Reconfiguring audiovisual practices in education: a feminist affective proposal for engaging with difference in educational contexts'' aims to explore how audiovisual practices can be an affective pedagogical tool for working with (and about) configurations of difference and their possibilities for transformation. This thesis is linked to the Horizon 2020 research project "Micreate: Migrant Children and communities in a Transforming Europe".

This paper has the goal to share the process in which the thesis is configured. That is to say, it shows the dynamics of the knowledge generation. Departing from the elaboration of the framework, it establishes a dialogue with the methodology and the fieldwork entry. This fact highlights the entanglement between ontology, epistemology, methodology and ethics. From feminist new materialist perspectives (Coleman, Page and Palmer, 2019), this is an ethical practice: there is not a division between the gaze from which we understand reality and the process we make knowledge (Barad, 2007). Knowledge is always specific and situated (Haraway, 2008) in the intra-actions (Barad, 2007) between the elements which compose the research. Moreover, research is “always becoming, newly invented, adapted, and fabricated” (Koro-Ljunberg, 2012, p. 808) depending on these mixtures. For that reason, giving an account of the research dynamics provides a situated practice for going beyond the understanding that knowledge generation is a static process.

In this research, the starting point has been the elaboration of the theoretical framework. This decision has been circumstantial, as the agreements with the fieldwork have been delayed for several facts. Some of them are my late entrance in the Micreate project and the covid-19 situation. Meanwhile, the literature review and the writing process of the framework has been done. Not understanding it as a finished chapter, but knowing that this should be revised during the fieldwork process. However, this fact has enabled the possibility to focus on how the concepts of difference, affective pedagogy and audiovisual practices can be understood from the approaches of the affective turn (Clough and Halley, 2007), the feminist new materialisms and the cultural studies (Hernández-Hernández, 2005)

From these perspectives, the concept of difference goes beyond the problematic category of diversity (Balza, 2014). Difference is understood as an intersection of the experience in which gender, origin, class configurations are materialized (Garcés, 2013) through relational forces such as discourse, affects, socio-cultural, historical and political worlds. An affective approach to pedagogy can attend to it as it focuses on the learning moments that enable students to connect with social and political realities in a collaborative way (Revelles-Benavente, 2017). Within this pedagogy, audiovisual practices can be a tool for configuring new worlds (Hernández-Hernández, 2005), moving bodies to action (Coleman, 2015, p.30), and going "beyond prewrite cultural limits, viewing the possibility to be more of what we are” (MacDougall, 2005, p.17). 

Therefore, constructing this framework positions me in a specific place in the fieldwork entry and indicates lines of action in research: it is focused on the visualizations, narrations, and socio-cultural-material-affective processes that are produced in the learning experience (Coleman, Page y Palmer, 2019). However, how this becomes knowledge has to be visibilized: genealogies, the fieldwork, and its affective relations are co-constituted in their relation, and this can not be divided from the data itself. This is the commitment to inhabit, not without tension, the complexities of attending audiovisual practices in a school where difference is materialized.

From a post-qualitative approach (St. Pierre, 2011), the methodology is an ongoing process that can’t be pre-conceptualized but generated in relation with the fieldwork context by asking ourselves which worlds we want to create (Hernández-Hernández y Revelles-Benavente, 2019). It is precisely this conceptualization that pushes me to share how the research is moving in its process. This can be done through an affective method (Mehrabi, 2020) which implies a processual, contextual and relational procedure. It is to say, the research is configured in the making, attending those relational and contextual moments that transform and move research through other directions. These are affective events of the experience, in which different realities are materialized. Therefore, the affective moments are not just focused on the event of audiovisual creation with students of one school situated near Barcelona (which it can be understood as the fieldwork), but the processes that are done in order to enter into class are also relevant. Being more specific: the research aims to explore how the affective processes of an audiovisual project at school can modify the capacity to act of students in relation to the concept of difference, generating knowledge in a collaborative way. The method is also a learning strategy implemented in one school with differential socio-cultural, origin or gender configurations of students. In it, there is a focus on those processes, relations and affects that emerge in the search for how they want a particular topic to be seen (Pujol et al., 2013 in Gandarias, 2014, p.290). However, in order to make this project possible, the thesis framework pushes to start the fieldwork by creating a relation with the school, the students, and the school staff. This moment is relevant in order to embody the theoretical framework to the reality of the school and, from this point, rethinking how an audiovisual project can commit with the concept of difference. This also modifies the theoretical framework. Hence, the affective method can’t be understood without the focus on relations and the adaptation of the research to the context. This configures an ethical practice: knowing as a process of response-ability (Haraway, 2008) that goes beyond the results and focuses on "how" the research can respond to the school context. In making visible the research process and the affective flows that modify it, it is possible to provide evidence of the situatedness of knowledge generation.

The present paper has the aim to make visible the thesis configuration. As argued above, it approaches the perspectives of the affective turn, feminist new materialisms and cultural studies. Moreover, it gathers a post qualitative methodology. In their entanglement, it is possible to think of research as an ongoing process that moves through affective moments: events in which the project is reconfigured. The thesis has started generating the theoretical framework in which difference, audiovisual practices and an affective pedagogy are conceptualized together. This configures a perspective for understanding how audiovisual practices can provide (affective) tools for education. It also provides a frame for action: attending those affective processes of the learning experience and the research process. For carrying out this proposal, there is the need to think about the ways the research will approach the fieldwork. For that reason, after the framework elaboration, the fieldwork entry has started with stays in one school. This helps to generate a relation with the school community, approaching their pedagogical practices and needs. At the same time, this fact rethinks the research. That is to say, the fieldwork entrance is an affective event: it enables to embody and transform the onto-epistemological frames of the thesis as well as it allows to materialize practices of affective pedagogy and the concept of difference. It also moves the research further: it invites to configure the audiovisual practices in relation to the projects they are carrying out, intra-acting the research with the school project as a responsible practice. Therefore, the fieldwork entry reformulates the methodological process, highlights the onto-episte-methodological and ethical entanglement and the dynamic nature of research. If the world is always in transformation, visibilinzing research processes matters: it allows us to understand that knowledge is always contextual and configured through the research process.

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