Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: a relational materialist methodological approach to educational research

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the habitual anthropocentric gaze we use when analysing educational data, which takes human beings as the starting point and centre, and gives humans a self‐evident higher position above other matter in reality. By enacting analysis of photographic images from a preschool playground, using a relational materialist methodological approach, we put to work concepts that open up possibilities to understand the child as emergent in a relational field, where non‐human forces are equally at play in constituting children's becomings. In the second part of the paper, we discuss how the decentring of the child may also be applied to researchers as producers of knowledge. Such a decentring, where the data itself is considered to have a constitutive force and be working upon the researcher as much as the researcher works upon the data, has both methodological and ethical consequences for research.

Keywords:

• anthropocentrism
• relational materialism
• feminist poststructuralism
• research ethics
• Gilles Deleuze
• Felix Guattari
• Karen Barad
• Claire Colebrook
• Elizabeth Grosz