Innovative methods are considered to help in the endeavour of teaching students to become reflexive personae. Thinking about the reflexive, thoughtful human being as a product of education and formation, researchers and teachers usually think about critique and critical methods, nowadays not just as derived from critical theory but also so-called “postcolonial” discussions, for example. Those methods or approaches are helpful to generate an interpretive understanding of data and deal with different kinds of sources, including photography, while helping to show pre-understandings and pre-formed lines of thought. And while I do not speak against those “classic” and wider ways to teach and employ reflexivity in the classroom or research groups, the focus of the proposed presentation is on the production of data, here photographs.

Visuals have been included in research to connect to communities and –in some ways– to connect communities. Methods like photovoice (e.g. Collier; Harper) or photo-elicitation (e.g. Harley; Burles and Thomas) can be read as attempts from researchers to connect to and include communities into research by giving them a voice (photovoice) or generate voices through connecting to photographs (photo-elicitation). And while those methods have been discussed widely and critically, they still offer starting points in participatory research approaches and mark a methodological shift. To include communities into research when doing research about them is often seen as including “voices from within the field” or “authentic voices” (and sometimes to get access to the communities). These attempts enable new discourses between "the field" and researchers beyond (formal) prescriptions to either side but pick up expectations from all directions to communicate possible shared understandings or go deeper into distinct interpretations.

This paper turns to 'doing photography': to take a picture is an act of producing knowledge in and over the “field”. I strive to scrutinize the performing act of taking photographs as performing “tacit reflexivity”: I propose that in the creative act of taking photographs, the reappearing line between art (creative) and non-art (‘disciplined‘ knowledge) gets blurred. To photograph is a kind of confrontation with reality; it is a new encounter with people and spaces, time and places that can be very exciting. The act of taking a picture is the attempt to mediate a situation, a place, a feeling, situated knowledge… through an image. Therefore pictures document and re-iterate (re-)inscriptions, but they also are interpretations and imaginations of the shown.

Photographs can push spectators out of their comfort zone and help them see the world differently. But taking pictures, I propose here, is also a way to step out of collective gazes that challenge well-known ways of seeing and narratives and calls for re-thinking. In this way, images have the ability to take part in, carry forth and encourage dialogue in relation to what it stands for. It is the moving body of the photographer in space, and her*his embodied gaze and the choice of narrative to develop that is essential for the image to emerge. In those “performing parts”, I see the tacit dimension of reflexivity because those embodied knowledges are not reflexive in the “usual” cognitive way. Only through the mirror of the image reflexivity can be approached, but this lurking reflexivity is central for the endeavour of the reflexive, critical persona.

This work lives from its inter- and trans-disciplinary approach, the theories and systematic view are from education, philosophy, visual studies, and arts-based education.

Methods in producing data include taking photographs: as read in the abstract, this is a complex process of creating meaning and translation into images using technology. In the process, all kinds of aids in performing reflexivity are applied: that is taking (field-) notes, observations of photographers, scratch books, “intellectual work” like thinking, research diaries, mapping feelings and others. The photographs are presented in a seminar and discussed with peers. This is recorded, too, and might help the following reflection of the discussion and the own meaning-making process to gain insight into translational issues between author and audience. As for the paper, the methodology includes discussions of epistemology, explanations of “lenses” in the process and theorization of (research) approaches. The body of work, created during photo sessions, will be looked at, arranged (disciplined?) and collected to further the theoretical argument or –and this must be done a well– to falsify the idea. Thus, the theoretical work done for the paper might include “exceeding”, “generating”, and “vibrating”, as Fendler (2012) puts it.

The aim of producing data and documenting this process during a university course was to gain insights into performances of knowing that are central for the process of taking photographs. The evaluation of the process helped to mark points or steps made in the mediation of situations in images. The data produced in the performing act of photography might lead a way to become a reflexive persona and to critique with the pictures taken as challenges for ethics of seeing. The aim of the theoretical work was and is to deepen understandings of performativity and reflexivity in order to better grasp the old educational idea of connecting to the world. The theoretical analysis of theories includes historicizing, distilling, exceeding and the search for vibrating (cf. Fendler 2012). By applying the trans-disciplinary approach, the educational systematic view is widened to fully use the potential of a multilayered philosophical conceptual work. Finally, both sorts of data, the theoretical and the qualitative, have veto power to each other’s propositions; in combination, both help the researcher’s imagination regarding the theoretical and the teaching project.

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