From 11 to 15 November, Federico Williams and Felix Büchner were invited to a writing retreat at UNISA – organised by Prof. Dr. Marcia Mkansi for the Research & Innovation Programme of the College of Economic and Management Sciences. The aim was to further develop their workshop on visual methods piloted last year at the RED conference organised by Prof. Dr. Paul Prinsloo at UNISA and to make it fruitful for experienced UNISA researchers and managers. The three-day workshop was based on Federico Williams’ doctoral research and included insights and experiences from the application of visual methods in the RED project in schools in Mexico, Argentina and South Africa. A short report on the workshop and its insights:
Day 1: Introducing Visual Methods
The first part of the workshop consisted of a theoretical, epistemological and methodological introduction of visual methods in educational science (and beyond). Starting with a description of the role of visualisations in the production of scientific knowledge (Latour, 1986) and a contextualisation of visual methods in the ‘visual turn’ in the social sciences (Dussel, 2013), we presented various examples of visual methods from the research literature. Examples included self-photographs by adolescents (Yates 2010), mappings of sociomaterial practices (Gourlay, 2015), historical drawings by children (Kay, 2021) and art-based projects with migrant children (Clacherty, 2021). Federico then presented some of the findings from his master’s thesis ‘Children’s and Adolescents’ Experiences of Migration: An Ethnography of the Casa Mambré Migrant Shelter’, in which he used visual methods in the form of comic stories. Finally, some visual examples from the data collection for the RED project were discussed. These examples were collected last year in our partner schools in KwaZulu Natal and Gauteng under the guidance of Dr Philip Ahiaku and Dr Godfrey Muyambi. Based on these examples, we demonstrated how visual methods can provide access to the lived experience of young participants and depict forms of knowledge that are otherwise difficult to articulate – an essential undertaking for the RED project, but one that also involves ethical challenges. We discussed these challenges, as well as the general potential of visual methods, with our South African colleagues.
Day 2: Creating Visual Narratives
In the second part of the workshop, we asked the participants to create their own visual narratives in the form of comic stories. As a ‘micro’ research project for the rest of the workshop, the participants described how they create a research text. As inspiration for this task we introduced a research paper by Lesley Gourlay, in which she adopts a phenomenological perspective to describe the material, social, affective, bodily and infrastructural aspects involved in the mundane practice of opening an email on a computer (Gourlay, 2024). After the production of the visual narratives, we discussed the process and the experience of production with the participants. It became clear that, on the one hand, the method was met with resistance – for many participants, the practice of drawing was associated with uncertainties, as was the sharing of personal experiences and feelings. On the other hand, however, they emphasised that the method opened up access to other forms of knowledge – situated, embodied and contextual knowledge – and thus enabled exciting and surprising insights.
Day 3: Analysing Visual Narratives
In the last part of the workshop, the participants analysed the visual narratives they had previously produced. In small groups, they considered what the narratives could tell us about the experience of producing research texts, about the human and non-human actors involved, and about the affects and emotions that arise during a writing process. In the discussion that followed, they raised topics such as the solitude or sociality of academic writing, the moments of inspiration or idea generation, and the role of digital platforms and infrastructures for writing. Finally, Federico provided insights into the analysis he is conducting on the visual narratives from the RED project for his doctoral dissertation. As examples, he presented the thematic grouping of narratives on the digital whiteboard platform ‘Mural’ and the possibilities of content analysis using coding and categorisation in the ‘MaxQDA’ programme.
We thank our colleagues from UNISA for the lively and inspiring exchange during the retreat. We also thank Prof. Dr Marcia Mkansi for her invitation and hospitality, Prof. Dr Paul Prinsloo for his support throughout the process and Dr Philip Ahiaku and Dr Godfrey Muyambi for their help with data collection and analysis.
Literature
Clacherty, G. (2021). Art-based, narrative research with unaccompanied migrant children living in Johannesburg, South Africa. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 36(4), 547–563. https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2019.1621766
Dussel, I. (2013). The Visual Turn in the History of Education: Four Comments for a Historiographical Discussion. In T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), Rethinking the History of Education: Transnational Perspectives on Its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge (pp. 29–49). Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137000705_2
Gourlay, L. (2015). ‘Student engagement’ and the tyranny of participation. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4), 402–411. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1020784
Gourlay, L. (2024). More-Than-Digital Meaning-Making: Paratexts of the Postdigital. Postdigital Science and Education, 6(3), 756–766. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00449-x 
Kay, C. (2021). German children’s art during World War I. Global Studies of Childhood, 11(2), 195–212. https://doi.org/10.1177/20436106211015694
Latour, B. (1986). Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands. Knowledge and Society, 6, 1–40.