Visual research methods in education: in between difference and indifference

The aim of this paper is to support critical and scholarly debates that relate to the increasing role of visual research in education, youth studies, sociology, and studies of mental health. Researching in fields where young people are central exposes many struggles, not least issues of how to represent students who end up on the margins. School disaffection intersects with curriculum practices. When threading together visual research methods and matters of curriculum studies, seduction can set in, and unintentionally curriculum research can become indifferent to difference, the counterpoint often sought by researchers. Some scholars may argue that this debate has been well rehearsed in the curriculum field; I, however, take the opposite view. The constraints of curriculum studies, issues of student disaffection and the exclusions of schooling - when analysed through the perspectives of visual research - trouble our research designs and understandings of data and therefore require more, not less, interrogation. Rethinking the intersection points between visual research methods (VRM) and visuality, a concept that is critical to cultural and visual studies, opens out new spaces in the field of curriculum studies and reframes the methodological decisionmaking process for researching issues that pertain to student disaffection. 

Coathanger : Finalist in the 2014 Bowness Prize

In the attempt to understand how the camera works I built a camera obscura and discovered that photography exists without us. That nature produces pinholes of light that form images came as a revelation. This spawned a new way of exploring the body in motion through photography. Guided by instinctual body memory of light and space I impose rules on how and when I shoot. In this series I ‘performed’ states of motion by combining elements together - a pas de trois of gravity, water and body mass caught in a flash, the action commonly known as ‘bombing’. I continue to ‘choreograph’ the moment in photoshop just like dance notation as if it could be read and repeated.

Bowness Prize Finalists Exhibition

A group exhbition of 48 finalists for the 2014 Bowness Photography Prize

When i look outside the window my shoes creak

 A solo exhibition consisting of a video projection

Conceit

Response to photograph in Land Before Line: A photographic Portrait Series of Contemporary Victorian Poets

Camera trapping: a contemporary approach to monitoring invasive rodents in high conservation priority ecosystems

Invasive rodent species have established on 80% of the world's islands causing significant damage to island environments. Insular ecosystems support proportionally more biodiversity than comparative mainland areas, highlighting them as critical for global biodiversity conservation. Few techniques currently exist to adequately detect, with high confidence, species that are trap-adverse such as the black rat, Rattus rattus, in high conservation priority areas where multiple non-target species persist. This study investigates the effectiveness of camera trapping for monitoring invasive rodents in high conservation areas, and the influence of habitat features and density of colonial-nesting seabirds on rodent relative activity levels to provide insights into their potential impacts. A total of 276 camera sites were established and left in situ for 8 days. Identified species were recorded in discrete 15 min intervals, referred to as 'events'. In total, 19 804 events were recorded. From these, 31 species were identified comprising 25 native species and six introduced. Two introduced rodent species were detected: the black rat (90% of sites), and house mouse Mus musculus (56% of sites). Rodent activity of both black rats and house mice were positively associated with the structural density of habitats. Density of seabird burrows was not strongly associated with relative activity levels of rodents, yet rodents were still present in these areas. Camera trapping enabled a large number of rodents to be detected with confidence in site-specific absences and high resolution to quantify relative activity levels. This method enables detection of multiple species simultaneously with low impact (for both target and non-target individuals); an ideal strategy for monitoring trap-adverse invasive rodents in high conservation areas.

Empire

Empire re-animates found historic stereographic photographs predominantly of Melbourne’s city centre between 1927 and 1940 when the colonial trace was slowly receding. Melbourne’s main Flinder’s Street Intersection is unsettlingly transformed into a Cubist perceptual maelstrom through repetition and flicker.