Limitless provocations of the ‘safe’, ‘secure’ and ‘healthy’ child

Abstract

This paper arose amongst the making and showing of a film and questions whether there are possibilities for interrupting powerful discursive frames that work at producing ‘the normal child’. Traditionally there has been a lack of interest in the use and critique of visual culture in educational research. Perhaps this lack of interest provides fertile opportunities to know something of the structure of education as a discipline, the rules that structure it and its deep grammar; it may also open up opportunities for disciplinary boundary-crossings where fields that embrace visual culture, such as photography and filmmaking, can bring their playfulness across binaries, including notions of certainty/ambivalence, to qualitative research in education. By turning to art theory, our aims are to interfere with our utopian longings that steadfastly cling to educational notions of the child.

Keywords:

• provocation
• visual culture
• children

Notes

1. Klara and Edda Belly Dancing (1998) by Nan Goldin was withheld on legal advice from the Publisher, and while this raises important ethical issues, these cannot be pursued here.

2. Whilst a ‘hoodie’ is an article of clothing favoured by millions of teenagers, it is also used in the UK press to describe young people who are suspected of or are involved with criminal activity.

3. The Lois project opens up issues around the family album, asking ‘what is missing?’. They document the artist’s daughter as she goes about her day-to-day activities. According to Andrews, as the project progressed, Lois started to look at the photographs her mother was taking of her and it soon became a collaborative endeavour. Lois would look at herself and when she looked a particular way, she would say to her mum ‘Take a picture of me doing this’.

4. Our initial selection of an image by Tierney Gearon was withheld following legal advice from the Publisher, and while this raises important ethical issues, these cannot be pursued here.

5. In 2009, Vanessa George, a nursery school worker from Plymouth, UK received an indeterminate prison sentence for sexually abusing children in her care and swapping images of the abuse with two other paedophiles.