THINKING, FEELING, AND CREATING WITH PHOTOGRAPHY:  
WIDENING THE LENS OF VISUAL RESEARCH IN EDUCATION 

By 

 

Vivek Vellanki 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A DISSERTATION 

 

Submitted to 

Michigan State University 

in partial fulfilment of the requirements 

for the degree of 

 

Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education – Doctor of Philosophy 

 

2020 

 

 

 

 
THINKING, FEELING, AND CREATING WITH PHOTOGRAPHY: WIDENING THE LENS 

OF VISUAL RESEARCH IN EDUCATION 

ABSTRACT 

 

 

By 

Vivek Vellanki 

 

This arts-based photographic research project consists of three written chapters and two creative 

works. The dissertation develops a focus on aesthetics, stories, and communities through 

photographic inquiry, which expands conceptualizations of visual research methodologies by 

interweaving the indexical/imaginary, art/data, and fact/fiction. Building on the works of artists, 

arts-based researchers, and interdisciplinary scholarship on visual research, the written chapters 

engage epistemological and ontological understandings of photography in educational research, 

close readings of Mahtab Hussain's photography examining the transnational histories and lives 

of the South Asian diaspora, and a study of methodology as a lifestyle choice. One creative 

component is The Passport Photo Project, which forms the basis for one of the artistic products 

(exhibition), traces the history of passport photos and reshapes understanding of these 

bureaucratic objects through collaborative art-making with immigrants and refugees. The second 

creative component is a photobook, Notes from the City, which offers photo-textual vignettes 

about migration, home, and belonging. Taken together, this dissertation demonstrates the 

multifarious possibilities for photography as theory, method, and artistic practice, while also 

attuning to the ethical questions that are yet to be addressed by educational researchers as we see 

drastic shifts in the role of the visual in our everyday lives.  

 
 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Copyright by 
VIVEK VELLANKI 
2020

 

 

In loving memory of Vidya Devi and Ramatulasamma. 

 

 

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

 
 

I imagine the acknowledgement section to be rightly titled “a list of co-authors.” The 

people I thank here have all made this dissertation possible, without them this document 

wouldn’t exist and nor would I.  

To my parents, Madhavi Pavuluri and Prasad Vellanki, for bringing me into this world 

and teaching me how to live. To Suyodhana Vellanki for being a brother and a friend, for always 

having my back. To my grandmothers, Vidya Devi and Ramatulasamma, this dissertation is for 

both of you, for all the ways in which you lived and loved, I hope that I am able to emulate your 

lives in some small ways. To my grandfathers, Ranga Rao Pavuluri and Ranga Rao Vellanki, I 

learned a lot from the way you both carried yourself and while you didn’t say much, your 

silences were important lessons.  

To Pratibha Vellanki, for being a pillar, always excited for me, whether it was about 

eating ice-cream or moving across the world. To Chai, for being a friend and a brother from day 

one. To Prakruthi Vellanki and Prabhakar Rao, for being a second set of parents. To Asha, Yash, 

Sridevi atta and Venu mama, for giving me a home on this side of the world. To my family and 

cousins, near and far, thank you for sustaining me in small and big ways.  

To all of my teachers, while I might not remember all the science, math, and literature 

you taught me, some of you taught me what it means to be an educator and a human-being, I am 

most grateful for these lessons.  

To my students at Royal Roses English Medium School and Michigan State University, I 

am grateful to have spent the time learning with you all. I hope that you will forgive me for all 

my shortcomings and any harm that I caused. To Felix Vijay for teaching me so many lessons 

about what it means to be an educator and for always forgiving my failures.  

 

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To Alyssa Dunn, my advisor, for being a mentor and role-model extraordinaire. Thank 

you for always having my back, for believing in me, for pushing me to do the work I wanted to 

do, for writing retreats, backyard barbeques, for reassuring phone calls and texts, for reminding 

us why we do this work, and for seeing us as humans, first and always.  

To Lynn Fendler, my dissertation director, for teaching me that methodology is a lifestyle 

choice, for silences, for many meals, for conversations about all the things, for encouraging all 

my wildest ideas, for identifying what I couldn’t yet name, for helping me unlearn, and for the 

most fitting end to my PhD education.  

To Lynn Paine for your generosity and patience with all my different projects. For always 

offering insightful comments on my work and helping me ask different questions, explore 

overlooked ideas. For all the respect, care, humility, and brilliance you share with us. To Vaughn 

Watson for teaching me how to weave together work with youth/community into the world of 

academia, for pushing me to consider how to do that with care and reciprocity, for reading my 

work and words with tender exactness.  

To my CITE cohort (2015), we truly are the dream team. I couldn’t have asked for a 

better community of scholars to begin my academic journey with. #LiveLove 

To Tashal Brown, Katie Schenkel, and Mary Neville for being my friends, family, 

writing buddies, critics, road trip buddies, playlist curators, roommates, and so much more.  

To Amit Sharma and Manasi Mishra for being the best partners-in-crime I could have 

asked for and for building everlasting bonds over broken legs, oranges in the wild, cooking, 

travelling around the world, dancing, art projects, films, and many many many conversations.  

 

 

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To Hannah Franklin Grisham and Darshana, for being my ride or die editors, critics, 

unicorn believers, art fanatics, fresh-air breakers, pandemic walkers, thank you for trusting me 

with your hair and for the gift of your friendship.  

To all my collaborators from The Passport Photo Project, thank you for sharing your 

lives, stories, artistic work, and time with me. I am grateful that each of you accepted my 

initiation and shared such moving and brilliant work with me and the world. None of this would 

have been possible without you all! To Manasi, Kristin, Robert, Amalia, for creating the space in 

your homes, communities, and workspaces to make it possible to do this work.  

To Lara Shipley for always pushing me to see (literally and figuratively) and to do more. 

To helping me see the future of a project long before I could recognize it. Thank you for your 

unwavering support and mentorship.  

To Alex Nichols, Jacquelyn Sullivan, Walt Peebles, and Michael McCune, thank you for 

all your support in making the exhibition (Do you have anything to declare?) a possibility. I 

learned, from each one of you, what it means to be an educator, artist, and a human-being.  

To all the faculty members at Michigan State University who taught me how to be a 

scholar/artist and for being caring, critical, and patient with me despite all my shortcomings—

Candace Epps Robertson, Julie Lindquist, Andrea Louie, Dorinda Carter Andrews, Django Paris, 

Amelia Gotwals, Niral Shah, Anna-Pegler Gordon, Tamara Butler, Colleen Tremonte, Ben Van 

Dyke, Siddharth Chandra, Sitara Thobani. Gail Richmond, Terry Flennaugh, Dan Kramer, Lucia 

Cardenas Curiel, Terah Venzant Chambers, Margo Glew, Karin Zitzewitz, Amita Chudgar, 

Aman Yadav, Marilyn Amie, Janine Certo, Sandro Barros, Sejuti Dasgupta, Sandra Crespo, 

Anne-Lise Halvorsen, Emery Petchauer, Qais Assali, Luis Shagun, jackie sumell.  

 

 

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To Wanfei Huang, Liv Furman, LJ, Karenanna Creps, Alecia Beymer, Kaitlin Glaus, 

Radhika, Azya, Jacquelline Carroll, Jane Kramer, for being such wonderful artists and 

companions on this journey. I am grateful to each one of you for sharing your work, words, and 

wisdom with me.  

To Matt Deroo, Amy Gunther, Scott Farver, Vy Dao, Darius Johnson, Mary Neville, 

Romina Pena-Pincheira, Renee Wilmot, Ashley Moore, I am thankful to have been a part of this 

advisee community and to have had the opportunity to think, write, and be alongside you all on 

this journey.  

To Marcos, Cierra, Effat, Lance, Scott Jarvie, Gregory, Allison, Jill, Stephen, Eliana, Ji 

Soo, Reyila, Kasun, Kraig, Christina, Dali, Anna, Christian, thank you for your friendship and 

support, you all have made this journey so much funnier, fashionable, critical, and joyous.  

To my IIT fellowship and MSU Hub fellowship communities, for helping me think about 

the university, the classroom, and the world differently, one sticky note, one poster, one 

presentation, one reading at a time.  

To Elise, Anicca, Sharieka, Rachel, Wil, and so many other amazing Writing Center 

consultants for always reading my work and words with generosity and love.  

To Chim, Kayon, Courtney, Molade, Sarah Bano, Hima, Ben, for all the chai, GoT, 

excited text exchanges, podcast notes, NBA fandom, Bon Iver listening, hot tubbing, 

longboarding, bougie-eating, and much more.  

To Meenakshi Sharma, Urja, Ujwalla, Sara Tahir, Madiha Ghouse, Rohit, Swati, Ashesh, 

Meenakshi, Inna, Marwa, Ezgi, Danny, Vanika, Nikhil, Valentin, Danielle, Daman, Pooja, 

Alounso, for helping me find joy, beauty, and friendship in East Lansing. And to the many others 

I likely forgot to name here, thank you for making my time at MSU special. 

 

 

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To Cassie Brownell, Bernadette Castillo, Jon Wargo, Tran Templeton, Amanda Smith, 

Vidya Subramanian for being wonderful mentors, friends, and role-models on this journey.  

To Riyad Shahjahan, Annabelle Estera, Dorinda Carter Andrews, Sharon Prince, Bethany 

Wilinski, Joanne Marciano, Bernadette Castillo, Davena Jackson, Tran Templeton, Urja Davesar, 

Tashal Brown for inviting me to write with you and teaching me what it means to craft worlds 

out of words and images.  

To Dorinda Carter Andrews, chairperson of the TE Department, Dean Floden, Michael 

Sedlak, and other administrators in the College of Education, thank you for your support. The 

MSU Grad School for its continued support through various stages of my graduate journey. Most 

importantly, the GEU, for always fighting for the rights of students. 

To Terry Edwards, Kristi Lowrie, Karen Gray, Sharon Mills, Noushin Mahmood, and 

Amy Peebles, you kept the department moving and while the university titles don’t recognize 

you for the educators you are, I have learned a great deal from you all. Thank you for everything 

you have done for me!  

To Nicole Geary, Trevor Hawks, and the communications team, thank you for being 

interested in my story and supporting me through my time here.  

To TIES, y’all know that I wouldn’t have been able to do most of my projects without 

your technical support and never-ending patience with my delays, thank you!  

To the MSU library, in particular Jill Morningstar and Deborah Margolis, for all the 

books, conversations, and editorial help. To the custodial staff, caretakers, gardeners, cooks, and 

so many other people who make sure the university runs smoothly, thank you!  

To Abhijna, for being a co-conspirator through so many years of schooling and 

education, and most importantly, for being an unwavering friend, for being family, the best kind.   

 

 

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To Aditi Rao, for holding my hand through the best of times and the worst of times, for 

dreaming with me, and for inviting me on many journeys, and for so many others still to come.  

To my MAEE friends, your commitments to justice and education will forever remain 

with me. To Manish Jain, Nandini Manjrekar, Disha Nawani, for always believing in me and 

pushing me to ask questions, lots of them. To Nrupo and Krittika, for inspiring me always, for 

going up and down escalators, for crossing borders, for dreaming together.  

To Yogender Dutt for taking a chance on me, so many times. To Ritu, for all the 

conversations, kadhi chawal, and laughs. To Anchari and Asta for making me feel younger and 

sharing so much love and joy with me. And to all four of you, for opening your home to me and 

for letting me be a part of the family. 

To Poonam Batra for encouraging all my wild ideas, for helping me understand the work 

of teacher education, and for the community at RRCEE. To Mili, Kriti, Malvika, and my other 

colleagues at RRCEE, it was a pleasure working, laughing, and learning with you all.  

To Abhishek Shaw for years of friendship and for introducing me to the world of social 

sciences even when I barely understood it, for helping me see anew.  

To Vicky and Aasheesh, for friendships that were built over clay fights, math lessons, 

bike rides, hockey sticks, and so many other random vagaries.  

To Mary, Ahona, Nishant Chavan, Kim, Greeny, Aamir, Shankar, Anushka, Siddesh, 

Bharat for being so patient with me despite all my disappearances, believing in my whacky 

ideas, for always being there, and for bringing laughter and love into my life. To my Ultimate 

Frisbee community in India and the U.S., thank you for teaching me what it means to play and 

lead with spirit.  

 

 

 

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To all my friends, family, and mentors who made it to my virtual dissertation defense in 

the middle of a global pandemic and cheered me on, thank you for your love, support, and 

limitless patience.  

To the land on which MSU and the U.S. rests, and the indigenous communities who have 

been displaced, I am a guest on these lands and my presence here is another marker of the settler-

colonial legacy, thank you for letting me be here.

 

 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 

LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................... xiii 

CHAPTER 1 Shifting the Frame: Theoretical and Methodological Explorations of Photography 
in Educational Research .................................................................................................................. 1 
Depth of Field: Photography and Educational Research ................................................................ 4 
Frames of Reference ....................................................................................................................... 7 
The Ontology of Photography .................................................................................................... 9 
Collaboration and Photography ................................................................................................ 14 
Thinking with Art/Photography ................................................................................................ 19 
What is Our Vision for the Future? .............................................................................................. 24 
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................. 27 

CHAPTER 2 Imagining Home: Mahtab Hussain's Photography of Diaspora and Belonging ..... 31 
What/Who is Diaspora? ................................................................................................................ 33 
Mahtab Hussain’s Going Back Home to Where I Came From ..................................................... 39 
Photographing Home, Creating Home ...................................................................................... 41 
Re-creating Mangla Dam: A Visual-Material Tracing of Diasporic Histories and Memories . 45 
Reimagining Boundaries: Curriculum, Diasporas, and Photography ........................................... 49 
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................. 54 

CHAPTER 3 Methodology as a Lifestyle Choice: Aesthetics, Community, and Stories ............ 58 
What is Methodology? .................................................................................................................. 60 
Methodology as a Lifestyle Choice: Some Considerations .......................................................... 65 
The Passport Photo Project ........................................................................................................... 70 
Passport Photos ......................................................................................................................... 71 
The Process ............................................................................................................................... 73 
The Analysis: Aesthetics, Stories, Community ........................................................................ 76 
Aesthetics .............................................................................................................................. 77 
Stories ................................................................................................................................... 80 
Community ........................................................................................................................... 81 
Implications for the Field and Future Research ............................................................................ 84 
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................. 88 

CHAPTER 4 Do You Have Anything to Declare? ....................................................................... 92 

CHAPTER 5 Notes From the City ............................................................................................. 101 
 

 

 

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LIST OF FIGURES 

 

Figure 1 Untitled. Photograph: Vivek Vellanki ............................................................................. 3 

Figure 2 Untitled. Photograph: Vivek Vellanki ........................................................................... 12 

Figure 3 Hồng-Ân Trương and Hương Ngô’s The Opposite of Looking is Not Invisibility and 
the Opposite of Yellow is not Gold at MoMa, New York. Photographs: Vivek Vellanki ........... 21 

Figure 4 Screenshot from Methodology as a Lifestyle Choice. Image courtesy: Vivek Vellanki 
and Lynn Fendler .......................................................................................................................... 66 

Figure 5 Untitled. Photograph: Vivek Vellanki ........................................................................... 74 

Figure 6 Scanning and Printing set up during one of the Passport Photo Project sessions. 
Photograph: Vivek Vellanki ......................................................................................................... 75 

Figure 7 Fabricating the stands to be used in the exhibition. Photograph: Vivek Vellanki......... 79 

Figure 8 Installation view of Do you have anything to declare? Photograph: Charles Benoit .... 80 

Figure 9 Wanfei's Passport Photo. Courtesy: Wanfei and Vivek Vellanki .................................. 81 

Figure 10 One of the Passport Photo Project sessions held in a collaborators basement. 
Photograph: Vivek Vellanki ......................................................................................................... 83 

Figure 11 Select Responses from Visitors to the Exhibition ....................................................... 84 

Figure 12 Front and Back of the Invite for the Exhibition, Do you have anything to declare? 
Design: Lindsey Hendges ............................................................................................................. 92 

Figure 13 View of the Exhibition from Outside the Gallery ....................................................... 93 

Figure 14 Artist Statement for the Exhibition (left) and Installation View (right) ...................... 94 

Figure 15 Drape with Projections Forming the Entrance to the Exhibition ................................. 95 

Figure 16 Installation View of Do you have anything to declare? .............................................. 96 

Figure 17 Installation View of Do you have anything to declare? .............................................. 97 

Figure 18 Installation View of Do you have anything to declare? .............................................. 98 

Figure 19 Visitors Interacting With the Artworks. Photograph: Vivek Vellanki ........................ 99 

Figure 20 Visitors Filling out Notecards at the Exhibition. Photograph: Vivek Vellanki ......... 100 

 

 

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CHAPTER 1 Shifting the Frame: Theoretical and Methodological Explorations of 

Photography in Educational Research 

In 2015, Teju Cole began reposting photos of the same place from other Instagram users. 

For example, in one series, you see multiple photos offering a birds-eye view of the Roman 

Forum (see Cole, 2018). In another series, we see the stairwell at the New Museum, New York. 

Cole’s reposts serve as visual essays showing a common theme across people’s photographs: 

“People don’t merely go to the same places or take photographs of the same monuments and 

sites; they take photographs of the same monuments and sites in the same way” (Cole, 2018). 

Scrolling through Cole’s Instagram feed made me think about photography in our contemporary 

world. At a moment when more people have access to cameras than ever before, why are we all 

making similar images? That question in itself warrants an article or two. The answers for Cole 

are rooted in, among a plethora of other factors, how the tourist space is structured through the 

use of sidewalks, gates, and looking points. This spatial structuring, according to Cole, 

influences the photographs we make of the location. The endless repetition of images on 

Instagram and the resultant grid of images compiled by Cole is a poetic meditation on the 

medium of photography and also offers insight into the human condition. And at the same time, 

Cole reminds us that a majority of the photographs made of a site are only from some limited 

points of view. But the possibilities for other points of view, at least in theory, are limitless. 

When I tell peers and colleagues that I am interested in thinking about photography and 

educational research, I am often asked “Have you heard about photovoice? Do you use 

photovoice?” The first few times I was asked if I was doing photovoice, I offered a vague 

response that (hopefully) suggested I was trying to do something else with photography. When 

the questions became a regular occurrence, I became curious. The repetition of the question, 

from scholars in education and other fields, gave me pause and made me wonder why so many of 

 

 

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us are pursuing photography in educational research through the lens of photovoice. In the 

methodological landscape of educational research, we are so often manoeuvred towards 

photovoice (Evans-Agnew & Rosemberg, 2016; Shankar, 2016). Eventually, I realized that their 

questions equate photovoice with photography in educational research—to “see” in the world of 

educational research, seems to mean to “see” through photovoice. Yet, I recognize the power and 

potential of photovoice, it legitimizes the visual medium in a research space that is 

predominantly print-based. It offers the opportunity for research participants to become the 

narrators of their own lives by “entrust[ing] cameras to the hands of people to enable them to act 

as recorders, and potential catalysts for change, in their own communities” (Wang & Burris, 

1997, p. 369). But I am also curious to see what else photography can do in educational research 

and practice.  What other possibilities exist for the medium of photography in educational 

research?  

I came to this question because of my existing relationship with photography. I came to 

photography much before I came to educational research. I came to it as a young boy insisting to 

be behind the camera and standing awkwardly in front of it. I came to it through the writings of 

Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes and John Berger. And through the photographs of LaToya 

Ruby Frazier and Teju Cole and Sohrab Hura and Carrie Mae Weems. My relationship with 

photography is one that slides on the spectrum of enamor, curiosity, and disdain for the 

medium—being moved by its immense power, intrigued by the possibilities, while also feeling 

immobilized by its limitations. 

I take inspiration from the grid of images created by Teju Cole and question our given 

understandings of photography and photographic practice. I travel across a landscape where 

educational research meets visual methodologies. And rather than constructing the same images 

 

 

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of this landscape, I travel to various corners and share snapshots that help us see this landscape 

anew, from various other vantage points. Taken together, the images I construct here offer 

alternative viewpoints that help us reconsider photography as a methodological approach, object 

of study, and medium of “reporting” in educational research. In so doing, I enter a conversation 

around photography and educational research that is at the interstices of fact/fiction, 

indexical/imaginary, art/data, etc. I ask: How has our understanding and use of photography, the 

camera, and the photographer been shaped by the field of educational research? How might arts-

based research create space for a more expansive engagement with photography? What 

possibilities exist for reimagining the role of photography in educational research? 

Figure 1 Untitled. Photograph: Vivek Vellanki 

 

Ultimately, the goal of this dissertation is not to critique or dismiss any particular 

methodological approach but instead to trace intimate relationships among photography, art, 

qualitative methodologies, and arts-based educational research in order to offer possible new 

visions and directions for visual research. Therefore, I respond to the above-mentioned questions 

by looking at three key elements within visual research. The first is the ontology of photography, 

in particular how our understanding of photographs and cameras have shaped our approach to 

 

 

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visual research. Drawing on the work of Azoulay (2015), I indicate how the traditionally framed 

binary of the photographer-photographed (and subject-object) limits our understanding of 

photographic practices and our readings of photographs. Second, by building on the disruption of 

the photographer-photographed binary, I examine how current approaches to collaboration in 

visual research are largely limited to creating opportunities for participants to make photographs 

or to interpret/analyze them. Building on the works of Campt (2017) and Drake (2014), I discuss 

additional ways to collaborate using photography/images. And third, drawing on the works of 

Hồng-Ân Trương, Hương Ngô, and Keith Secola I examine how photographs can help us 

feel/think/theorize within the field of educational research by attuning us to the material and 

affective dimensions of photography.  

Depth of Field: Photography and Educational Research 

Historically, photography has played an important role as a research tool in the fields of 

sociology and anthropology. The development of the camera towards the end of the 19th century 

and its subsequent ubiquity in the early 20th century made it an important device within field 

work practices (Edwards, 2015; Pinney, 2012). The camera has primarily served as an instrument 

for recording information, a tool for data collection, identification, and categorization of people, 

cultures, and places. In the study of other cultures, the camera served as a device offering 

additional proof, a visual certainty to what was being described by the ethnographers. The initial 

obsession with the mimetic function of photographs artificially limited the role of photography to 

representation and data collection. Tracing this early history, Pinney (2012) asks if photography, 

“is to be understood as a transparent objectification of a photographer’s intentions, a mere device 

for the capture of surface evidence?” (p. 56). 

However, drawing on Edwards (2015), I take the position that the camera has never been 

merely a passive device; along with the photographer it is always enmeshed in power relations: 

 

 

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“photographs mark not only the photographer’s standpoint but a point of view of those in front of 

the camera, even if that moment is asymmetrical. Subjects are never passive—they think, they 

experience” (p. 241). Over the past few decades, scholars across many disciplines have created 

methodological approaches that try to address the asymmetries of power between the researcher 

and the researched. These broader questions on methodology and the asymmetries of power 

between the researchers and the researched have also translated into visual research and the use 

of the camera within these contexts. The development of participatory methodologies such as 

photoeliciation and photovoice have transferred the instrument of data collection (the camera) or 

the object of study (the photograph) over to the participants (Wang & Burris, 1997; Wilson et al., 

2007). By creating opportunities for community members to create their own photographs and/or 

to articulate their readings of photographs, participatory visual methodologies center the voices 

of research participants. These methodologies attend to some of the obvious asymmetries of 

power in visual research i.e. who wields the camera? Who reads/interprets the images? How do 

we understand the visual from the perspectives of the insiders? However, despite these 

significant shifts, questions remain about how these ideas are taken up by researchers (see 

Evans-Agnew & Rosemberg, 2016) and about the “(im)possibility of empowerment” (Higgins, 

2016, p. 681). Even with these shifts towards participatory approaches, the possibilities for 

photography in educational research remain largely untapped (Tinkler, 2008).  

Three key assumptions about photography and its use in the research process are evident 

to me in existing participatory approaches such as photovoice and photoelicitation. First, the 

process of photography is reduced to two elements—the making of images and the reading of 

images. While these are important aspects of photographic practice, we can also consider other 

elements of the photographic process such as viewing images, writing with images, curating 

 

 

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images, etc. I discuss some of these in greater detail in subsequent sections. Second, the process 

of coding and thematic analysis of images is a representational approach that is often used to 

offer an understanding of the image. The perspective of the photographer (research participant) 

or the researcher or both are mobilized to direct viewers on how to understand the image and to 

interpret its meaning. In other words, the work of the viewer is often done for them by offering a 

definitive reading of the image. Third, some researchers argue for the separation between the 

aesthetic and the mimetic. For example, discussing the ways participants can be oriented to 

photovoice research, Latz (2017) writes that participants “should also be reminded that the 

aesthetics of the photographs are much less important than the meanings assigned to them” (p. 

76). These three aspects are not inherently problematic for they offer a particular understanding 

of and an engagement with photography. However, these assumptions flatten how photography 

is understood and how it could be used in educational research. 

To be clear, any particular method is not the issue. Rather, it is, what Springgay and 

Truman (2018) call, the “logic of proceduralism” that has foreclosed an exploration of inventive 

and aesthetic possibilities for photography and photographic practice in educational research. 

Several researchers have taken approaches like photovoice and offered significant re-

articulations (Luttrell, 2010; Shankar, 2016). However, I am interested in a different intellectual 

exercise. Rather than thinking about how photography can fit existing logics of representational 

qualitative research—collect, validate, codify, represent—I am interested in exploring the 

affordances of the photographic medium and its practice that go beyond what photovoice and 

other representational qualitative methods have offered, and engage it artistically, aesthetically, 

and conceptually. I do so by problematizing dominant approaches to photography in educational 

research. My goal is to “rupture taken-for-granted habits, tropes, and common assumptions” 

 

 

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about photography through a process of “thinking-making-doing” (Springgay & Truman, 2018, 

p. 208).  I look for inspiration and flights of thought in literature, art, and research outside the 

field of education and engage with the work of scholars and artists who embody and practice 

thinking-making-doing. 

         

In this dissertation, I approach photography primarily through the work of artists, rooted 

in an engagement with artistic practice rather than merely engaging with its manifestations in 

qualitative research. I am drawn to the work of artists who push us to question the purposes of 

photography itself and also ask us to reimagine its possibilities. As I think about all the works 

and the practices of the photographers who have influenced me, some of whom I mentioned 

earlier, the underlying thread for me is that they help me “break through the horizons of the 

ordinary, of the taken-for-granted, to visions of the possible, of ‘what is not’” (Greene, 1977, p. 

287).  

          Therefore, my goal is not to dismiss existing methodological approaches but rather to 

explore multiple possibilities for visual research. In the following section, I indicate the 

epistemological and ontological understandings that shape my own orientation towards 

photography. I situate this framing within the broader field of arts-based research, highlighting 

key features of this paradigm that help us develop an expansive vision for the role of 

photography, to imagine otherwise.  

In exploring artistic and inventive possibilities for photography in educational research, I 

Frames of Reference 

join scholars who have pushed our understanding of what does and does not constitute research. 

In particular, the works of arts-based and humanities researchers like Anzaldúa (2015), Campt 

(2017), Eisner (1995), Greene (2000), Kumar (2000), Sharpe (2017), Sousanis (2015), Springgay 

(2004), Ulmer (2016), amongst several others, have created room for a more expansive 

 

 

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understanding of research. A somewhat simplistic but useful feature distinguishing arts-based 

educational research from other forms of educational research is its use of “aesthetic qualities to 

illuminate and reveal educational situations and experiences” (Eisner cited in O’Donoghue, 

2009, p. 352). Apart from the focus on aesthetics, I also see arts-based educational research as 

“an ethical relationship with curriculum, pedagogy, and educational research. It is a process and 

form of research that attends to human interactions and social interactions that produce 

knowledge and bodies” (Springgay, 2004, p. 14). 

          My affinity towards arts-based research is driven by the epistemological and ontological 

beliefs that undergird artistic practices. In particular, its focus on aesthetics and its consideration 

of the affective, material, and visual registers as important aspects across the various stages of 

the research process (creation, analysis, and sharing). While it is also important to note that arts-

based research includes a number of different approaches, here, I outline a particular 

instantiation of arts-based research that is interested in “describing and interpreting the 

complexity of experience among researchers, artists, and educators” situated in communities 

of practice while centering “relational inquiry, relational aesthetics, and relational learning” 

(Irwin & Springgay, 2017). As I indicated earlier, I am not interested in viewing art only as a 

way to collect data that will then be coded and analyzed using traditional qualitative approaches. 

Instead, arts-based research “asserts a form of making that has traditionally been understood as 

expressive rather than analytically communicative (often, although not always, art making), as 

equivalent in value (though different in kind) to the knowledge-making practices of traditional 

academic disciplines” (Loveless, 2019, p. 29). This particular belief and approach to arts-based 

research has also helped me see the limitations of how photography has been used in some 

methodological approaches that I discussed earlier. 

 

 

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          Second, arts-based research is also, in some instances, deeply invested in the work and 

work practices of artists. Their work and work practices provide compelling insights into the 

limits/affordances of the medium, emergent ideas, divergent practices, as well as theoretical and 

conceptual insight. In fact, O’Donoghue (2009) urges more arts-based researchers to engage with 

the works of artists, art-critics, philosophers of art, etc. and asks, “How might a close, critical, 

and deeply contextual analysis of the work and work practices of artists advance, develop, and 

enhance understandings, theories, and practices of arts-based research?” (p. 353). In the 

introduction, I used Teju Cole’s work to raise some questions that I have been grappling with as 

an arts-based researcher who uses photography and I continue to draw on the work and work 

practices of artists throughout this dissertation to inform my own understandings and practices. 

          My focus on photography within educational research is guided by the above mentioned 

considerations. In the following sections, I discuss my epistemological and ontological 

orientations towards photography. As you will see, these are guided by a diverse range of 

theoretical, empirical, and artistic works. I draw on contemporary artists, art critics, cultural 

theorists, educational researchers, etc. to indicate how I think about and work with photography 

using arts-based research. I focus on three key ideas: the ontology of photography, collaboration 

and photography, and thinking/theorizing with photography.     

The Ontology of Photography 

Much of the discussion about photography within educational research has been guided 

by two considerations (Greene, Burke, & McKenna, 2018.; Higgins, 2014, 2016). The first 

relates to the issue of who wields the camera—who is the photographer and whose gaze is 

centered. This concern has resulted in the emergence of participatory methodologies wherein 

research participants make the photographs and photography is reduced to the agency of the 

photographer (Sutton-Brown, 2014). The second relates to the issue of the photograph and what 

 

 

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it shows or conveys, i.e. represents. This has resulted in a deliberation of issues of voice and 

agency in relation to photographs and questions about who plays a role in reading and assigning 

meanings to the images (Epstein, Stevens, McKeever, & Baruchel, 2006; Harper, 2002). Some 

scholars have attempted to address the reading of images as a problem that needs to be solved 

methodologically (e.g., Latz, 2017; Wang & Burris, 1997). This has meant that participants who 

make the photographs should be asked what their photographs mean/convey. In other instances, 

people who have been photographed should be shown photographs to investigate how they read 

the images (Buckley, 2014). In both these methodological approaches, an attempt is made to 

reach a sovereign reading of the photograph, either from the perspective of the photographer or 

the photographed or both. 

In one sense, a sovereign reading of an image is held together by an idea of who is behind 

and who is in front of the camera. However, Azoulay (2015) writes that photography “is made up 

of an infinite series of encounters” (p. 26). Instead of viewing the photograph as the sovereign 

frame of the photographer, we can consider the photograph and what it inscribes “as resulting 

from an encounter between several protagonists that might take on various forms” (p. 12). In 

essence, Azoulay is arguing that the sovereignty over the images that is usually ascribed to the 

photographer/photographed is something to question and investigate. “What is written in 

[photographs] is always excessive with regard to any sovereign representation that one side or 

another – be it the photographer, the photographed person or the person in charge of the ‘arena’ 

in which the photograph was taken – wishes to impose on it” (Azoulay, 2010, p. 10).  

For several contemporary scholars and artists, this ambiguity and multiplicity of 

photographs make them a source of creation and investigation. Campt (2017), for one, debunks 

the idea that any image can be read in a singular manner. Using mugshots, family portraits, and 

 

 

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other images, Campt (2017) asks us to consider the “hum” that these images produce. Even in 

these images, some of which are created under conditions of dispossession and subjugation, she 

finds compelling narratives and reminds us that photographs are “neither wholly liberatory 

vehicles of agency, transcendence, or performativity nor unilateral instruments of objectification 

and abjection” (p. 59). Photographs, for Campt (2017) as well as other artists and scholars, are 

ambiguous and contain an excess which is not simply seen or read but also has to be heard, felt, 

and touched (Brown & Phu, 2014). 

The ambiguity and excess in images that Azoulay (2015) discusses is something that has 

been flattened within some approaches to photography in educational research. Issues of power, 

voice, and agency are central to all photographic practices and have been acutely raised in the 

context of social science research (Edwards, 2015; Prins, 2010; Sontag, 2009). However, in my 

opinion, the transferring of the camera to research participants or asking them to read images 

does not necessarily resolve issues of power, voice, and agency. Rather, it offers a temporary 

closure to the meanings of photographs by transferring the responsibility of 

deciphering/coding/analyzing images onto research participants. 

Another example might be helpful here. The passport photograph is a common 

identification document, a visual object that I return to repeatedly in my own artistic practice. 

Over the years, rules governing passport photographs have shifted. In these photographs, we 

can’t smile or wear anything that covers the head. The distance between the face, the monotone 

backdrop, and the edge of the photograph has to be precise. One might consider the passport 

photograph to be a flat document. It is read by authority figures as a representation, as a means of 

identification, matching the likeness of the person in front to the person in the photograph. At the 

airport, at the bar, the person guarding the entrance always holds up my passport photo to my 

 

 

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face, trying to establish a similarity. This is a particular type of an encounter with the passport 

photograph. As I try to think of what else the passport photo does, I am reminded of my father’s 

wallet. In it, he always has a passport photograph of my mother. A photograph that is probably 

several decades old at this point. He always looks at it longingly. In that same flat photograph, 

my father seems to find different affective intensities. For him, the photograph conjures 

memories, visions, and relationships to whom the image portrays. He is neither the photographer 

nor the photographed. I have never asked him if he was there when the photograph was made. It 

is possible that he was, but I guess that doesn’t matter either.  

Figure 2 Untitled. Photograph: Vivek Vellanki 

 

Building on these considerations, I conceptualize photography as a series of encounters 

beyond the acts of photographing or an initial viewing of images. The possibilities of these 

encounters, as I indicated with the example above, are never simply determined by the 

photographer, the photograph, or the photographed. Instead, they are also subject to contexts, 

personalities, and the particular moments of encounter created in the process of engaging 

photography and photographs. To put it another way, “photography provides a productive 

interface—as site where haptic and optic coincide and where a confluence of feelings, not to 

 

 

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mention fields of inquiry, collide—for investigating the implications of the convergence of 

sensation and perception” (Brown & Phu, 2014, p. 21). 

Within the context of educational research, exploring the possibilities of photography 

entails moving past the binary of the photographer or the photographed towards an engagement 

with the multiplicities photographs offer in our lives. This includes, but is not limited to, an 

exploration of the multifaceted role of photographs and photography in our everyday lives, 

attuning ourselves not only to the loud and extravagant but also to the quiet and quotidian 

(Campt, 2017). As I argued earlier, visual research within education has largely limited itself to 

focusing on who wields the camera and who reads/analyzes/codes images. However, there is 

room for us to engage in explorations of photography that engage the affective, the visual, the 

aural, the gestural, and the haptic. An engagement with these elements, as I have argued above, 

can attune us to aspects of photographic practice that are often overlooked within traditional 

research. For example, in describing her research with young children and their photographic 

practices, Templeton (2018) argues that it is important to attend to the varied resonances of 

images in the lives of young people. Templeton (2018) makes a shift by closely attending to the 

visual, sensory, gestural, and spatial in young children’s photographs of New York City. She 

writes: “Until I looked at their photos, I had not considered the city a significant space for the 

young children in this study, yet one affordance of children’s photography is that their pictures 

present new focal points and ways for adults to think about children’s lives in ways we had not” 

(p. 13). Furthermore, Templeton (2018) reminds us that in order to be able to see, hear, think, 

and feel photographs on these varied registers we could try and move past our habitual, adult-

ways of reading and interpreting images.  

 

 

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In order to attend to the affective intensities of images, beyond their indexical quality, we 

have to move past existing theoretical and methodological frameworks. “If we read images with 

the same literacy skills as we use to read words,” Fendler (2017) writes, “we will not be able to 

see what images are and what they do” (p. 751). In this section, I have argued that the ideas of 

excess in images (Azoulay, 2015) and attending to the affective registers of photography (Campt, 

2017) opens up a plethora of possibilities and “new analytics for thinking—and feeling—

photography” (Brown & Phu, 2014, p.21) that has only recently begun to play a role in our 

engagement with the visual in educational research.  

Collaboration and Photography 

The shift towards participatory visual methodologies emerged against the backdrop of a 

critique of traditional qualitative research methodologies which were seen as being extractive, 

pushing an asymmetrical relationship between the researcher and the researched, and often 

reported findings only from the perspective of the researcher. Within this context, cultures 

(particularly of marginalized and colonized peoples) were described as ‘primitive, savage, and 

underdeveloped.’ Photographs played a key role in depicting these cultures and also in offering 

‘veracity’ to the claims made by the researcher. However, despite its ubiquitous role in field 

work, photographs were usually absent from published monographs. Pinney (2012) drawing on 

the works of middle-20th century anthropologists argues that this absence might be because the 

“emotive power of the picture” was hard to control thereby potentially risking a fracture of the 

‘objective’ purpose of the researcher (p. 61).  

Several artists and theorists have pushed our understanding of collaboration within 

photographic practice. Drawing on the work of Susan Meisalas and Wendy Ewald, Azoulay 

(2016) argues that “collaboration is the photographic event’s degree zero” involving several 

actors (p. 189). While we would often place the person behind the camera in a position of 

 

 

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authority, “the photographer cannot a priori claim a monopoly over knowledge, authorship, 

ownership, and rights” (p. 189). What does it mean that collaboration is the photographic event’s 

degree zero? Put simply, it is a limitation to assume that the photographer is the subject and the 

photographed is the object, with the direction of power simply flowing from the photographer to 

the photographed. Instead, photography is multiply agentive and actions emerge across various 

encounters and engagement with the process and images.  

Over the past few decades, collaborative approaches have been seen as a solution to the 

extractive and predatory nature of social science research and have been positioned as positive. 

As I discussed earlier, the idea of collaboration within visual research has taken the form of 

engaging research participants along the lines of the photographer or the interpreter of 

photographs. The shift from yesteryears has been that the camera, initially wielded by the 

researcher, has been turned over to the participants with the hope that the resultant images would 

not reproduce the ethnographic gaze of the researcher. Thus, it is not only who the photographer 

is, but the very act of making an image from behind the camera that achieves heightened 

importance. This particular collaborative approach shifts the power wielded by the researcher by 

making the subsequent act of interpreting/analyzing images a ‘collaborative’ endeavor. However, 

despite this shift, the relationship(s) among the photograph, photographer, photographed, and 

spectator remain underexplored.  

If we consider collaboration to be photography’s event zero, then how do we think about 

engaging in other forms of collaboration that move past the role of creating/analyzing images or 

the binary of the photographer-photographed? While we often see collaboration as a positive 

engagement, Azoulay (2016) reminds us, that there is an “unavoidable collaborative dimension 

of photographic practice, regardless of the photographer’s intention or success in engaging with 

 

 

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others in a just or hospitable manner” (p. 188). Collaboration is always already present in 

photography and is not necessarily reflective of a positive relationship (although it can be) 

between the various actors. Campt (2017), for example, uses ethnographic images of Black 

South African women from the late 19th century to illustrate that these images are not merely 

about dispossession and subjugation. To see these photographs as only resulting from the 

subjection of the women to the colonizers’ gaze would be to ignore their quiet resistance and 

miss “the visible manifestations of psychic and physical responses (rather than submission) to 

colonization and the ethnographic gazes it initiated” (p. 51; emphasis in original). Instead, Campt 

(2017) sees these images as emerging from a collaboration, one that is most definitely 

hierarchical and unequal, that nonetheless visualizes a “tense grammar of colonization and black 

self-fashioning” (p. 50). Using her method of “listening to images,” Campt (2017) suggests that 

“we think of self-fashioning in these images as complex articulations of self that resist easy 

categorization and refuse binary notions of agency versus subjection” (p. 59). The women’s 

resistance is registered on the image in unheard frequencies. In order to access these unheard 

frequencies, we must also hear them to attend to the tensions between the photographed and the 

photographer that might not be apparent visually but can be brought out by drawing on other 

analytics. 

For example, Azoulay, Meisalas and Ewald examined over hundred photography projects 

to chart out eight different clusters to illustrate the various ways in which photography can be 

collaborative. One of the clusters they examined is called “Coarchiving.” In this cluster, they 

discuss collaborative projects in which, instead of a traditional museum or archivist, the 

“community performs its right to archive” (p. 197). The category is used to explore collaboration 

by examining the various relationships that are formed through photographic practice (across the 

 

 

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spectrum of production, storage, and circulation of photographs) and the ways in which people 

engage with it. Phu et al.'s, (2017) The Family Camera Network is an example of community 

archiving that has demonstrated ways to collaborate beyond the binary of photographer-

photographed. By crowdsourcing photographs from families living in Canada, this project shows 

“how photos are produced and move and create meaning within a family” (p. 159). And at the 

same time, the process of archiving and community analysis, aided an exploration of family 

photographs in “multisensory ways” and “lays bare the influence of the nation-state in 

constructing ideas about family at the same time it illuminates the transnational dimensions of 

visual kinship” (p. 159). Through this project, the researchers were able to collaborate with 

community members to share compelling stories, visual and otherwise. This approach stands in 

contrast to existing collaborative practices like photovoice which seek to disrupt the power 

hierarchy between the photographer-photographed by shifting the camera away from the 

researcher to the researched. The Family Camera Network’s practice of collaborative archiving 

pushes forward “the ideas that photography is not a record but a site of action, and that revisiting 

its history is not sealing it off but opening it up for others to engage with its findings and pursue 

them further” (Azoulay, 2016, p. 198). A part of the collection has been made available online 

through the The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives and the Royal Ontario Museum. 

These imaginative approaches to collaboration attune us to the multiplicity of meanings, 

resonances, and feelings that reside in and move through photographs and photographic 

practices.  

As a photographer, I am interested in thinking about ways of collaborating beyond asking 

research participants to become photographers. “Collaboration in photography cannot be limited 

to the question of how to engage others in the event of photography but must also ask how the 

 

 

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photographer herself engages with the act of photography” (Azoulay, 2016, p. 191). In the 

context of visual research, this can be paraphrased to ask how the researcher themselves engage 

with the act of photography. It is for this reason that the cluster of projects from Azoulay’s 

(2016) typology that caught my attention most strongly is titled “The photographer seeks to 

reshape the traditional authorial position through the photographed person’s collaboration.” 

Azoulay (2016), Meisalas, and Ewald argue that the capturing of an image is “only one aspect of 

photography, which should be considered alongside other procedures such as sharing the camera, 

collecting photographs; sorting, sharing, showing, viewing, and archiving them; as well as 

writing on them and through them” (p. 195).  This articulation reminds me of Carolyn Drake’s 

(2014) book Wild Pigeon. For this project, Drake photographed the Uyghur community in China. 

She grappled with the ethical question of being an outsider who is photographing a community 

that is subject to hyper-surveillance and persecuted by the Chinese state. She wondered if her 

photographic perspective adequately represents the Uyghur experience and asks “what, if 

anything, did the pictures I was taking mean to the people in them?” She responded by inviting 

collaborators to manipulate the images she created through a process of writing, collage, and 

other forms of manipulation (see Drake, 2014). The result is a complex body of work that 

disrupts our traditional understandings of the roles played by the photographer and the 

photographed in the process of creating an image. As noted above, the relationships and 

interactions between the photographer and the photographed are usually hidden on the plane of 

the image.  In the traditional framing, the photographed is mostly seen as being passive and 

subjected to the gaze of the photographer. The image is seen as a creation of the photographer 

and the credit is all theirs. How many remember the name of the woman sitting in Dorthea 

Lange’s The Migrant Mother? However, in Drake’s work we see a significant disruption to this 

 

 

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understanding. While we don’t always learn the names of her collaborators (a deliberate choice 

she makes to protect their identities), she invites them to visualize the relationship between the 

photographer and photographed through a physical manipulation of the image. As a spectator, I 

am invited to view Drake’s photographs through the traces and inscriptions created by her 

collaborators.  

Drake’s process of collaboration challenges traditional understandings of the role of the 

photographer and the photographed. The photographs are made by her, but her collaborators 

transform them in big and small ways. They hide some things, add words and phrases, cut out 

whole pieces of the image, or bring different images together to make something else. This 

particular practice of collaboration challenges dominant understandings of the role of the 

photographer and photographed. Most importantly, it visualizes collaboration as pushing the 

limits of the photographic medium.  

 

Drawing on the work of artists and scholars, I have indicated above the possibilities for 

us to reimagine collaboration beyond the act of being a photographer in the community or 

inviting others to engage in the practice of being photographers. These ‘new’ collaborative 

practices push us to explore the ways we can, as artists/researchers/educators, invite 

collaborators to write with, think with, archive, and manipulate photographs. Ultimately, these 

imaginative collaborative practices, which often emerge from the work of artists, create 

opportunities for us to understand the multifarious roles photographs play in our lives and in 

reimagining the role of photography in educational research. 

Thinking with Art/Photography 
 

While in the earlier sections I focused on the process and analysis used in the context of 

photography within educational research, I now want to turn my attention towards the role of 

photography in offering conceptual/theoretical insight for educational praxis. I argue that in 

 

 

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order to tap into the potentiality of photographs to help us think/feel/theorize, we have to move 

past the idea that photographs and photographic works are merely data that need theories and 

analysis applied to them. Despite the efforts to incorporate photographs as a way to move beyond 

print-based text as data, much of the analysis grates images into textual fragments—codes, 

themes, narratives—that are strung together to form print-based textual descriptions. The 

materiality and visuality of photographs is flattened into print-based text.    

I remember the first time I saw Hồng-Ân Trương and Hương Ngô’s The Opposite of 

Looking is Not Invisibility and the Opposite of Yellow is not Gold at MoMA, New York. In this 

work (Figure 7), the artists mined family albums to find vernacular photographs of their mothers, 

who had moved as refugees during the U.S. war in Vietnam. These images, which depict their 

everyday lives, are juxtaposed with transcripts from congressional hearings in the 1970s about 

Vietnamese refugees. While the photographs are printed on lush, velvety paper, and mounted on 

golden-yellow backgrounds the transcripts are laser engraved and exhibited behind a highly 

reflective glass. As a viewer, I quickly identified the images, but I had to look closely to read the 

court proceedings. I often only gleaned snippets. 

Drawing on this work, as an example, I ask, how can we use art/photography to think? To 

theorize? To analyze? I see artistic/photographic practice as holding the potential to push 

theorizing and help us engage the contemporary world in multitudes. I think that the ability for 

art to do this repeatedly lies in its willingness to engage multiple senses, affect, reason, memory, 

and a plethora of ways in which all of us come to know, sense, and be in the world. On the 

contrary, much of qualitative/representational research has limited itself to rationality, reason, 

and words.  

 

 

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Hồng-Ân Trương and Hương Ngô’s juxtaposition of the domestic (photographs) with the 

public (transcripts of congressional hearings) is not just a discursive move but a material one too.  

The laser engraved text creates a new relationship for the viewer. Together, they push the viewer 

to see how “the invisible histories of Asian American families and the broader national 

imperative in which war, the economy, and labor are bound up with each other” (Ngô & Trương, 

2018). Long after I left the museum, I thought about their work and how they used their family 

photographs to theorize a relationship between the state and the refugee, between the personal 

and the political, and between women, domesticity, and nationalism. These elements exist 

alongside each other and collide with each other discursively as well as materially—the lives and 

desires of the women, their families, and communities sit alongside the rancid bureaucracy of the 

state. 

Figure 3 Hồng-Ân Trương and Hương Ngô’s The Opposite of Looking is Not Invisibility and the 

Opposite of Yellow is not Gold at MoMa, New York. Photographs: Vivek Vellanki 

 

 

 

In trying to think, feel, and theorize with art/photography, I am interested in two 

elements. The first is to examine the ways artists are pushing our understanding of photography 

itself and articulating new ways to read, analyze, engage, and understand photographs (Brown & 

 

 

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Phu, 2014; Campt, 2012; Huang, 2019; Mani, 2010). Hồng-Ân Trương and Hương Ngô’s work 

achieves this by taking the overdetermined genre of family photographs and repositioning them 

as quiet yet bold responses to the state’s imagination and treatment of refugees. This visual, 

material, and affective treatment offers a new vantage point for viewers/educators to consider 

concepts/ideas that have been discussed within (educational) research (Bajaj & Bartlett, 2017; 

Coe, 2010; De León, 2015).  

Hồng-Ân Trương and Hương Ngô’s photographic work engages several ideas at once and 

bridges the divides between the academic/non-academic by utilizing the affective, material, and 

visual registers of photography/art. It pushes past the dominant idea that “words are the only tool 

of thought” (Sousanis, 2015). The overreliance on print-based text within educational research 

“marginalizes, excludes, and negates alternative ways of being (ontology) and knowing 

(epistemology)” (Carter Andrews et al., 2019). The work of artists/photographers, like Hồng-Ân 

Trương and Hương Ngô, “offer new lenses through which to look out at and interpret the 

educative acts that keep human beings and their cultures alive” (Greene, 2000, p. 4). As 

educators and researchers, we could consider ways to engage these “other” ways of knowing and 

acknowledge “how form makes worlds” too (Loveless, 2019, p. 102; emphasis original). The 

question of form has particular import for researchers/artists who consider “the aesthetic, 

excessive dimensions of knowledge” and the ways in which this shift in the process and output 

of our research-creations can lead to the emergence of new pedagogical encounters (p. 39).  

The field of arts-based research has consistently challenged the divide between art and 

research. For a long time, arts-based researchers have argued for the inclusion of artistic practice 

in the paradigm of research. Borrowing from Greene (1977), I explore what the artistic-aesthetic 

can do for curriculum as well. If art is not merely something that needs theory applied to it, then 

 

 

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how can we think of art as also offering a space to theorize, to grow and to un/learn? Tuck and 

Yang (2014) write, “using art to think/feel through theory—to decode power and uncode 

communities—trains our intuition” (p. 814). Artistic practice has a crucial role in shifting 

research practices away from its damage-centered orientation towards a desire-based 

engagement.  

Keith Secola, an indigenous artist based in the U.S., created a series titled Postcolonial 

Revenge. This project includes family photographs that are screen printed onto “historical” 

publications and textbooks that condone the settler-colonial legacy and the ongoing erasure of 

indigenous cultures and lives. The photographs that make up Secola’s works are from his 

family’s archive, made between 1800 and 1950, and passed onto him by his mother. Secola’s 

pieces are “a focused critique of text, images, and persuasion throughout history” (Metcalf, 

2019). Postcolonial Revenge has deep resonances for the field of curriculum studies. In 

particular, the area of textbook studies which has been concerned with examining the gaps, 

silences, and erasures of particular peoples, histories, and cultures within school textbooks. 

Secola offers his own interpretation and conceptual analysis to these erasures. It is an 

interpretation and critique that is, both, deeply personal and political; conceptual and material. 

By superimposing his family photographs onto the covers of books, Secola is asking us to 

consider what these erasures mean for his family and community. More importantly, his work 

raises some pertinent questions—What do we miss out on when we study erasures/silences in 

textbooks only using the textual? How does this affective/material intervention shift our 

understanding of erasures/silences in textbooks and its impact on 

individuals/families/communities? How do we, as educators and researchers, shift away from a 

damage-centered approach towards a desire-based approach to researching textbooks? And 

 

 

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finally, building on that last question, how do we, through our research and teaching, center the 

lives, desires, and histories of the very communities that are affected?  

These are some questions that came to my mind as I engaged with Secola’s work. This 

list is not exhaustive. However, I hope the works of the artists above highlight how photographic 

(and other forms of artistic) practices can “offer modes of sensuous, aesthetic attunement, and 

work as a conduit to focus attention, elicit public discourse, and shape cultural imaginaries” 

(Loveless, 2019, p. 16). Photographs are not merely data that need theory applied to them, but 

they also offer us ways to think, question, feel, be, and to imagine otherwise.  

What is Our Vision for the Future? 

To insist that contemporary photographic practice — and I mean to include a majority of the 
international news coverage in newspapers like this one — is generally made (and published) for 
the greater good is to misconstrue history, because it leaves out the question of “Good for 
whom?” 

 – Teju Cole, On Photography, New York Times  

 
 

The camera is a recent invention in human history, its presence in our lives is perhaps 

equivalent to the blink of an eye when measured against geological time. And yet, the profound 

impact of cameras and photographs on human (and more-than-human) life cannot be 

underestimated. In the preceding sections, I argued for us to reconsider and to reimagine the role 

of photography within educational research and practice. In doing so, I most often highlighted 

and shared examples of artists and works that use photography to provoke, question, and 

challenge the status-quo. However, if I was to say nothing of the ways in which photography has 

and continues to reinscribe regimes of power, domination, and dispossession then I would only 

be offering you a partial picture.  

 

When I was first trained formally in using a camera, I was taught all the basics—aperture, 

shutter speed, ISO, etc. My  instructor gave me assignments—still life, portraiture, street 

photography, etc. The camera made me see differently, it made me curious about life around me. 

 

 

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I was driven by an impulse to capture everything and everyone that seemed interesting to me. I 

was taught to be discreet, unobtrusive, and focused on the photograph I wanted to create. I would 

often walk up to people and photograph them, asking for their permission verbally, rarely 

explaining why I was photographing them. To be honest, I had no idea either. My friend Jasmine 

accompanied me during one of my sessions. She observed my practice and towards the end 

asked me, “Do you feel no hesitation, walking up to people and photographing them?” Her 

question, she insists to this day, was innocuous. However, it sent me down a spiral, making me 

wonder about my own photographic practices. Why was I making the pictures that I was 

making? What stories was I trying to tell? And what stories was I telling about the people I was 

photographing? I realized that my photography instructor had taught me how to use the camera 

but never really helped me consider how to use the camera ethically or responsibly.  

 

We are at a moment in human history when more people have access to cameras than 

ever before. This has enabled us to democratize ‘vision’, allowing us to see perspectives, 

peoples, and places that were unseen before. And at the same time, it has made much more 

apparent the injustices we are surrounded by—photos and videos of police brutality, the murder 

of humans trying to migrate, and the toll of war. Cole (2019) makes a grim forecast: 

“Photography’s future will be much like its past. It will largely continue to illustrate, without 

condemning, how the powerful dominate the less powerful” (para 17). As more and more 

educators and researchers draw on ideas of multimodality, arts-based research, and visual 

methodologies, to inform their scholarly work and teaching, the time to consider the ethics of 

image-making and its role in contemporary life is now.  

 

We are currently experiencing rapid changes to the ways in which photographs are 

created, circulated, and curated. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its ubiquitous 

 

 

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use across web platforms, “the overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for 

other machines, with humans rarely in the loop” (Paglen, 2019, p. 24). We are already noticing 

how these technologies permeate our everyday life—facial recognition, surveillance systems, 

and social-media algorithms. These technologies are now being mobilized at a large scale to 

monitor and control citizens. How do our research methodologies and teaching practices attend 

to this new reality? “Formal concepts contain epistemological assumptions, which in turn have 

ethical consequences” (Paglen, 2019, p. 27). Our theoretical concepts and methodological 

approaches could shift drastically and as we examine these new questions, technologies, and 

modes of interactions we cannot simply rely on siloed disciplinary traditions. Our attention 

towards the ongoing changes to our visual culture and practices will determine how the field is 

framed over the next few decades and more importantly, how photographs, images, and the 

visual intervene in our everyday life.  

 

Throughout this chapter, I articulated some shifts that help reframe our understanding of 

photography and how it is used within educational research and practice. However, there are yet 

many more turns to be made. I hope this paper serves as an invitation for those of us who are 

interested in the visual to ask more questions, to critically engage our own practices and those of 

the scholars/artists who are interested in a similar task, and to reflect on the ways in which we 

invite our research participants and collaborators to engage with the visual. These are 

unchartered territories, and as Paglen (2019) reminds us “it is in inefficiency, experimentation, 

self-expression and often law-breaking that freedom and political self-representation can be 

found” (p. 27).

 

 

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REFERENCES

 

 

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CHAPTER 2 Imagining Home: Mahtab Hussain's Photography of Diaspora and Belonging 
 

My cousins moved to the U.S. when I was eight years old. As a young boy growing up in 

Hyderabad, India, their photographs were conduits for me to imagine and to understand their 

lives in the U.S. My fascination with photographs and the layered meanings these objects hold 

for migrants has continued into my scholarship. Having migrated to the U.S. myself in 2015, I 

learned that the photographs that I saw as a young boy are fragments that could never fully 

convey the complexity of my cousins’ everyday lives. At the same time, they offered me a visual 

entry-point into a world that was far different from my own. I remember the photograph of my 

cousin in Chuck E. Cheese, celebrating his birthday. My other cousin standing in front of a 

mound of snow in a pink coat. These photographs allowed my family to develop an 

understanding of their lives beyond what they could convey to us through words. The blue in the 

sky looked different, the snow felt foreign to our own tropical lives, yet the green of the grass 

appeared the same.  

 

“Photographs bring together ontology and phenomenology” (Brown & Phu, 2014, p. 15). 

In the lives of the diaspora, photographs have served as a means of communicating the 

incommunicable, they offer a glimpse into the minutia of everyday life by capturing the material, 

the affective, and the bodily on the two dimensional plane of the image. However, as Lee (2018) 

reminds us, despite the central role of photography within the lives of the diaspora it has received 

little attention within the field of diaspora studies. Photography’s complex role in the history of 

migration and colonialism make it a particularly interesting medium through which to explore 

diaspora consciousness (Banerjee, 2010). More importantly, beyond its broader role in these 

histories, the nature of the medium and its slippages between fact/fiction, memory/present, 

capture/loss make it particularly valuable in the context of diaspora studies. 

 

 

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 “The framework of diaspora,” Lukose (2007) reminds us, “has been so strikingly absent” 

from our investigations within educational research (p. 408). The burgeoning field of diaspora 

studies offers the opportunity to engage questions of home, belonging, and diasporic subjectivity 

beyond the binaries of assimilation/integration, home/away, here/there, foreigner/citizen. This 

scholarship pushes us to think beyond the nation-state as the unit of analysis within educational 

research (Shahjahan & Kezar, 2013). It also asks us to reconsider our understandings of the 

cultural, social, political, and educational processes undergirding the lives of the diaspora. The 

centering of the nation-state within educational institutions and research practices is, arguably, 

one of the causes for the on-going marginalization and alienation experienced by youth living in 

the diaspora (Abu El-Haj & Skilton, 2017). Bénéï (2005) along with other scholars show how 

various overt and covert practices within schools “manufacture” a citizenship which is deeply 

embedded in the modernist project of the nation-state. In recent years, scholars have shown us 

how some young people elide national boundaries (real and imagined) and use the arts to 

construct and inhabit imaginative geographies (El-Haj, 2009; Hamman & Zúñiga, 2011; Rios-

Rojas, 2011).  

While scholars engaging questions of diaspora, home, and belonging in the context of 

education have considered literature (Villenas, 2009), films (Maira, 2009), music (Gopinath, 

1995), and other artistic media (Vellanki & Prince, 2018) as sources for insight, photography has 

largely been absent from these discussions. My focus on photography, as a specific 

artistic/documentary practice, is driven by my own personal interest in the medium, its role in the 

lives of the diaspora, and also because of its doubled “omission”1 from the fields of diaspora 

studies (Mani, 2010) as well as education (Fendler, 2017).  

                                                 
1 I want to be careful about how I articulate this perceived omission. It is important to acknowledge that in the past 
few decades there has been a growing interest in the relationship between diaspora and photography. A significant 

 

 

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This paper responds to this omission by considering the works of photographers dealing 

with questions of diaspora, home, and belonging in the context of South Asia. I do this by 

offering a close reading of the works and practices of Mahtab Hussain, a British-Kashmiri artist. 

I turn towards the diasporic photographer and examine the visual narratives constructed through 

an alternative vision of be/longing and migration. I explore Hussain’s photographic practices 

because of my belief in the role of the arts in allowing us “to see more in our experience, to hear 

more on normally unheard frequencies, to become conscious of what daily routines have 

obscured, what habit and convention have suppressed” (Greene, 1995, p. 38). I examine 

Hussain’s work by placing his photographs and practices in conversation with the work of 

scholars in the field of diaspora studies and educational research (Banerjee, 2010; Brah, 1996; 

Lukose, 2007; Trinh, 2011; Villenas, 2007). Through this engagement, “I am interested in what 

lingering in these works and work practices might offer” the fields of education and diaspora 

studies (O’Donoghue, 2009, p. 354).  

The term diaspora has a long and contested history. The early use of the term focussed on the 

What/Who is Diaspora? 

experiences of specific communities (Jewish, Armenian, Greek and African) facing exile and 

displacement. The meanings associated with this term have varied over the past few centuries 

with contemporary usage focussed broadly on “cultural productions and identity formations of 

migrant communities that have become important and salient for the larger political, economic, 

and cultural transformations that mark contemporary globalization” (Lukose, 2007, p. 409). This 

history, and the shifting nature of the term, has been traced and explored extensively (see Butler, 

                                                 
portion of the work has dealt with familial photographs (for e.g., Campt, 2012). Several other scholars have engaged 
with the subject of photography and diaspora through the lens of artistic practice (for e.g., Mani, 2010). The work of 
these scholars informs my own scholarship. However, in this paper I am engaging the overlapping omission of 
photography in the context of diaspora studies and educational research.  

 

 

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2001; Clifford, 1994; Hall, 1998). In this paper, I draw on Brah’s (1996) conception of diaspora 

which moves beyond the categories of home, movement, and community. For Brah, diaspora is 

not simply a matter of an individual/group moving to another region and forming a “new” 

community that continues to be intimately tied to the “homes” they left. Instead, diaspora is “an 

interpretive frame referencing the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of these 

contemporary forms of migrancy” (p. 186). Brah’s work brings together the conceptions of 

migration, home, community, be/longing, and explores their relationship to the categories of 

borders and the politics of location. With this shift, diaspora studies is not simply engaged in 

tracing movement across borders but also in the “imaginative worlds and cultural productions of 

migrants” (Lukose, 2007, p. 409). A reimagination of who/what diaspora is has enabled the 

disruption of a nationalist, assimilationist model of immigration, which in turn affects how it is 

possible to imagine schools, students, and the purposes of education. Diasporas articulate and re-

articulate themselves through various cultural, social, and political practices that potentially 

escape the logics, structures, and boundaries of the nation-state.  

While the social-sciences have seen a resurgent interest in diaspora studies over the last few 

decades, these themes have been explored for much longer via the arts—literature, films, music, 

performance, etc (Raiford, 2006). One could argue that diaspora(s) has always been involved in 

imaginative treatments of their own lives. These explorations, which are small and large, 

ordinary and extraordinary, have offered articulations of what it means to live here and there in 

order to create an elsewhere. For example, the letters written by diaspora(s) are personal 

articulations of the economic, cultural, and psychic process undergirding their lives. Familial 

photographs that travel across borders offer a visual rendition of lives, transporting an 

imagination and a materiality to other contexts, other homelands. As Villenas (2007) reminds us, 

 

 

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these practices “often remain elusive to an academic project which is always coming after to 

describe what is past tense to those who are creating these phenomena” (p. 424). Butler (2001) 

argues that “much of diaspora experience is unwritten: it is inscribed in the creative arts, material 

culture, and oral traditions” (p. 212). Therefore, more recently, scholars within the field of 

diaspora studies have begun to (re)articulate what it means to be diasporic by relying on the 

cultural and material artifacts produced by diaspora(s) and the imaginative explorations they 

offer (Appadurai, 1996; Campt, 2012; Cho, 2009; Gopinath, 1995).  

Despite these imaginative explorations, the conditions of the nation-state, pursued through 

several state-sponsored institutions have forced diaspora(s) to choose between a here and there. 

As an educational scholar, I see schools as primary sites of building an imaginary of the nation-

state (Anderson, 2006; Bajaj et al., 2016; Shirazi, 2018). Diasporic youth are often forced to 

leave their imaginations, curiosities, and cross-cultural affiliations at the doorstep (El-Haj, 2009). 

In the last few decades, educational scholars have considered, more seriously, the creative 

remixing that diasporic youth embark on, exploring the ways in which they construct 

imaginations of a here, there, and an elsewhere.  

How does one attune and attend to these cultural, political, and social border-crossings within 

the context of educational research? The responses from educational scholars to this question 

have ranged from following the everyday lives of diasporic youth closely (Hamman & Zúñiga, 

2011; Maira, 2002) to exploring how the arts can provide a foray into understanding the 

complexities of diasporic lives. For example, Villenas (2009) argues for the use of literature 

within the English classroom as a way of disrupting traditional understandings of the nation-state 

and the lives of the diaspora. El-Haj (2009) explores the role that films can play in developing 

ideas of a postnational citizenship. Alim and Pennycook (2007) examine the role of hip-hop in 

 

 

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developing glocal constructions of the real that elide the boundaries of the nation-state and 

engage the creative remixing that diasporic youth embark on. As Boym (2011) notes, the shifting 

nature of migration led theorists to draw on the work of artists, and the artists to rely on theorists 

in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of diaspora—“disappointed with their own 

disciplinary teleology, they emigrate into each other’s territory” (p. 119). Nonetheless, despite 

the recent attention towards the role of the arts within the lives of the diaspora, photography has 

been repeatedly side-lined (Lee, 2018).  

 In arguing for an engagement with photography in the context of diaspora studies and 

education, I am not simply calling to add photography to a list of interchangeable arts that have 

been used to explore the questions outlined above. On the contrary, I make a case for 

photography as a unique artistic practice that has much to offer towards an understanding of the 

social, cultural, and political processes that undergird the lives of the diaspora. In recent years, 

scholars have attuned to, what Raiford (2006) calls, “a photographic ‘practice of diaspora’” (p. 

212). The role of photography in contemporary migration through its official/institutional uses 

(for e.g., passport photos) and deeply personal/communal uses (for e.g., familial photographs) 

make the medium particularly interesting in exploring ideas of home, borders, location, 

belonging, and memory (Banerjee, 2010; Campt, 2012). Furthermore, “photography’s capacity 

to build or envision community across geographical location, its capacity to engage its viewers 

on both critical and expressive or emotional registers” make it pertinent in the context of 

diasporic lives (Raiford, 2006, p. 213). In recent years, both fine-art and documentary 

photographers living in the diaspora have taken up these questions within their practices and 

offered “a visual account of lives on the move; [documenting] social and cultural flux, identities 

in the making, a new kind of cosmopolitanism, and flexible citizenships” (Lee, 2018, p. 182). I 

 

 

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offer an articulation of what photography can do for the fields of diaspora studies and education 

through an examination of the works and work practices of Mahtab Hussain (2017), a 

contemporary artist, who offers creative imaginaries of diasporic lives that move beyond 

home/away, host/immigrant, here/there, citizen/migrant, etc.  

Mahtab Hussain, the focal artist of this chapter, is a member of the Azad Kashmiri diaspora, 

working in varied contexts, using different styles, and embarking on travels across real and 

imaginary boundaries. I engaged with Hussain’s photographs as a South Asian migrant who has 

lived in India, the U.K., and the U.S. I haven’t visited Azad Kashmir yet and only understand it 

through the collective imagination of the broader publics which has been shaped by the media 

and political discourse. The region has a troubled history which became exacerbated around the 

time of the partition between India and Pakistan in 1947 (Kanjwal, 2017). Azad Kashmir is 

governed by Pakistan and shares borders with Jammu and Kashmir, which is currently under 

military occupation by India. Across these regions, there have been ongoing political struggles to 

end occupation and calls for sovereignty (Ali et al., 2019). While I assemble my understanding 

of Azad Kashmir through Hussain’s artistic work, I also learn that this is a deeply personal 

project. Hussain is trying to preserve a semblance of life in this region, trying to imagine how his 

mother lived and loved here. And at the same time, trying to answer for himself, what might his 

life have looked like had his family not left the region? I am drawn to his work because of what 

it offers me, a South Asian migrant living in the U.S., and the broader 

questions/feelings/memories it evokes for me as a migrant/photographer/educator.  

Hussain’s work is a heady mix of artistic brilliance, memory, and nostalgia. However, I 

am wary of reading his work as an easy resolution of questions inhabited by the Azad Kashmiri 

diaspora. I read his work as offering a particular history of the Azad Kashmiri diaspora, a 

 

 

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creative imagination and fabrication. More importantly, Hussain’s artistic process offered youth 

and elders in the community an opportunity to unlearn linear histories. In this way, Hussain’s 

work addresses a significant gap in the educational experiences of diasporic youth—an 

opportunity to engage their histories and biographies beyond the dominant narratives of any 

singular nation-state. Bhattacharya (2019) reminds us that opportunities to explore these complex 

transnational histories are largely absent not only from K-12 schools but also within academia, at 

the level of theoretical, methodological, and conceptual engagements. His photographic practices 

created an educational experience for youth that offered a reinterpretation of diasporic history 

using the very materials (metal, clay, and water) that were significant to their migration and lives 

in Britain. Lukose (2007) reminds us that as educational scholars, an exclusive focus on schools 

and classrooms, ignores other “spaces for the articulations of diasporic cultural sensibilities” 

which are also “powerful aspects of immigrant student identity formation” (p. 415). His work 

creates “a complex encounter between diasporic longings and belongings, powerful processes of 

national racial formation, and state practices in ways that are producing new forms of cultural 

production and experiences between diaspora and nation” (p. 412). The pedagogic elements of 

Hussain’s work are not merely in the work he creates but also in the processes that he embarks 

on. As educators, we can learn from the questions he asks and the kinds of opportunities he 

creates for community members to embark on similar imaginative journeys.  

In each section, I offer a close reading of his photographic work refracted through the lens of 

theorists working in the area of educational diaspora studies. Using this artistic and theoretical 

grounding, I then offer my own subjective reading of his work. I tease out the relationships 

between his artistic work, the lives of South Asian diaspora, and broader arguments within the 

field of diaspora studies. I end the paper with reflections on what Hussain’s work potentially 

 

 

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offers the field of educational studies. This work is also a tentative boundary-crossing, an attempt 

towards re-imagining what these fields might offer each other if we embarked on travels across 

disciplinary boundaries, real and imagined. 

“The best I could do was to collect memories with my camera…The work grapples with what it 

Mahtab Hussain’s Going Back Home to Where I Came From 

is that I will never truly be able to own.”  

– Mahtab Hussain, Going Back Home to Where I Came From 

Hussain’s family moved from Azad Kashmir to Scotland during the late 20th century 

following the building of the Mangla Dam. Hussain was born in Glasgow, and lived also in 

London, and Birmingham as a child. He wouldn’t visit Azad Kashmir till he was an adult. As a 

young person, artist, and photographer, Hussain remembers repeatedly being asked by White 

British people, “Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” The multiple dimensions of 

diasporic life combine to construct a complex idea of “home.” For a larger part of his adult life, 

Hussain wondered what it would mean to go back to his ancestral home, to visit the homelands 

that his family left behind, but where he himself had never visited. Going Back Home to Where I 

Came From is a manifestation of Hussain’s desire to return home, to an imagined life in distant 

lands through the photographic lens as he travelled to Kashmir for the first time as an adult. The 

title of the book offers a twist to the xenophobic slur “Go back home to where you came from.” 

In Hussain’s work we see a visual rendition of the impossibility and absurdity of the racist insult: 

go back home to where you came from. Hussain travelled home, to Azad Kashmir, with his 

camera and walked away with photographs which are physical/digital remnants of home and yet 

continued to question where is home—is it here, there, or elsewhere?  

Hussain’s (2017) artistic work is concerned with “race, identity, politics, gender, 

hybridity, and cultural difference within the British Muslim community” (n.p.). Going Back 

 

 

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Home to Where I Came From is a collection of three different but related projects. The 

Auspicious Journey includes tintype photographs of British Kashmiri migrants created by 

Hussain during his residency on a boat in the Black Country. The process and experience lead to 

Mitti ka Ghar, an installation of a mud house in a gallery in the U.K. However, the bulk of Going 

Back Home to Where I Came From consists of photographs created by Hussain in 2016 when he 

travelled to Azad Kashmir. The first time I flipped through Hussain’s book I noticed the absence 

of page numbers. I reached the end and only then realized that the title page was there. I read the 

book backwards. Perhaps, Hussain left out page numbers to offer us no readymade ways to read 

this book. The title is followed by Hussain’s three-page essay which is written left-to-right, 

traditional English script, but the pages are organized as if the book is being read right-to-left. 

Even in the form of the book, Hussain combines the formal features of English and Urdu 

languages and bookmaking practices to offer a form that is neither wholly here nor there.  

In Hussain’s (2017) work I see a visual rendition of Brah’s (1996) conception of diaspora 

space as a “genealogical analysis of the relationality within and between diasporic formations” 

(p. 241). Hussain’s work explores this idea by examining the “contemporary conditions of 

transmigrancy of people, capital, commodities and culture. It addresses the realm where 

economic, cultural, and political effects of crossing/transgressing different ‘borders’ are 

experienced; where contemporary forms of transcultural identities are constituted; and where 

belongingness and otherness is appropriated and contested” (p. 242). Hussain traces the history 

of the Mangla dam and its impact on the lives of people living in the region, eventually leading 

to displacement and the “emergence” of a diaspora that has continued to be influenced by 

memories of and lives in various lands. His work illustrates the inextricable links between the 

project of the nation state, migration, displacement, home, transnationalism, and photography.  

 

 

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I combine Brah’s (1996) conception of diaspora space with Banerjee’s (2010) emphasis 

on photography as a unique medium through which to explore diasporic consciousness. 

Photography, Banerjee (2010) writes, offers an “unbridgeable abyss between the moment of 

recording and the moment of looking at the photograph, and the impossibility of returning to the 

originary moment captured in the photograph” (p. 455). This quality of the medium, she 

continues, “render[s] it a most appropriate trope through which to represent diaspora 

consciousness” (p. 455). In Hussain’s work, we see a visual/material rendition of these concerns. 

He is, at once, articulating his own identity as a member of the Azad Kashmiri diaspora in 

Britain and developing an understanding of how this migration has impacted his ancestral 

homeland.  

 

In the following section, I examine two important aspects of Hussain’s work. The first 

aspect is Hussain’s attempt to preserve memories of the homeland through his photographic 

work which focuses primarily on Azad Kashmir. The second deals with his visual-material 

tracing of diasporic histories, in particular, how his artistic work brings to light the broader 

socio-economic and cultural conditions that led to the formation of the diaspora community.  

Photographing Home, Creating Home 
In Kyoto, 

hearing the cuckoo, 

I long for Kyoto. – Bashō 

Hussain’s journey towards creating the photographs in Going Back Home to Where I 

Came From is long and interesting. Hussain created images in his ancestral home in Azad 

Kashmir, trying to connect with a land and a people that his family was pushed away from many 

decades ago. The images are of the everyday: a cow being readied for slaughter, a young boy 

who has stepped out of a pool of water, and corn kernels being dried in the sun. Hussain’s 

 

 

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photographs effuse a longing in the quotidian quietness, making us see the home that he longs 

for. A home that he has known only second-hand, mostly through accounts from his family and 

friends. A home that he has known mostly through other people’s memories.  

The bulk of the photographs in Going Back Home to Where I Came From were created 

during Hussain’s first visit to the region. The photographs and the book are an attempt to 

preserve diasporic memories of the homeland. This is a challenging project because what 

Hussain (2017) wishes to preserve doesn’t exist any longer, it has been remade and transformed. 

He relied on memories, of those living in the diaspora, to construct this preserve. He wrote, “I 

wanted my work to encapsulate this profound feeling of having returned home” (n.p.). As a 

photographer, he funnelled these memories and his own experience of returning to the homeland 

through the camera. However, how does one preserve a home that one has only known through 

memory? How does one preserve and materialize memory? These are questions that diasporas 

across the world are concerned with.  

For Hussain and several others like him, “migration is tied to an originary moment that 

they cannot access in memory” (Banerjee 2010, p. 446). However, they access this through 

shared and collective memories and imaginations passed on through conversations, stories, art, 

music, and literature. Hussain’s photographs carry within them this subdued memory of a place 

known mostly through second-hand accounts. Remember the photographs my cousins sent to 

me? They helped me construct an imagination of the U.S. long before I visited this land. That 

imagination was partial and fragmentary, but the images became part of my memory. The 

photographs taught me to look for some things—the strip malls, the blue in the sky, peculiar 

mascots. Hussain’s photographs remind me of a carefully curated visual preservation of a place. 

As I read his work, I feel that the photographs are constructed by someone who knows the place 

 

 

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well, even if only through second-hand accounts. Hussain seemed to have known what to look 

for and he looked in the crinkles of everyday life and not simply the extravagant.  

Hussain returned to Azad Kashmir in order to answer questions for himself and to seek 

out a homeland that he had known, until then, through distance and memory. To write diaspora is 

to write mourning, Vijay Mishra remarks. What does it mean to photograph diaspora? Hussain 

offered his own personal answer to this question. In Going Back Home to Where I Came From 

he traces a relationship between his family, borders, transnational flows, and a politics of 

location. He does this with tenderness and care. He does it with a curiosity that is deeply 

personal and political. "Every form of memory—the individual memory of personal experiences, 

cultural memory or trans-generational 'postmemory'—depends on re-articulations and re-

enactments. Its contents are necessarily modified and invented as they are remembered" 

(Baronian et al., 2007, p. 12). In many ways, Hussain’s attempt to trace this relationship is tied to 

various aspects of his own journey and biography. It is tied to the stories his mom told him. It is 

tied to the community in which he grew up and it is also tied to the persistent othering he 

experienced as a young man in the U.K., being told to “go back to where you come from.”  

Hussain’s photographs trace these desires—to see, to be seen, to know, to be known, to 

be a member of the community, to preserve what he never knew in flesh and dirt. “The best I 

could do was to collect memories with my camera…The work grapples with what it is that I will 

never truly be able to own” (Hussain, 2017, n.p.). On a two-page spread we see corn kernels 

being dried on a patterned sheet. On the right is a young person holding a corn cob and 

seemingly breaking the kernels. On another spread, we see a photograph on the left with two 

ladders resting against a mud wall. On the right are two young boys, standing awkwardly in front 

of the camera. One of them is clutching some bills and the other holding, what appears to be, 

 

 

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something edible (see https://www.mahtabhussain.com/work/going-back-home-to-where-i-

came-from/). "It is the local nature of these other explorations that is significant—these 

explorations are mining rich seams of information, finding stories that for too long have been 

either sedimented in the archive or stored amongst papers and albums held in family attics and 

suitcases, stories which incrementally reshape our picture of the past" (Grosvenor, 2007, p. 616). 

Hussain’s photographs reach for a visual/material preservation/creation of a diasporic home. 

Hussain (2017) wrote, “I seized the chance to wander around the cornfields [my mother] 

would have run through, retracing some of the paths she would have taken, even sitting on the 

same well she once described to me” (n.p.). Hussain connected with his homeland through the 

memories and stories shared by others. However, in the statement accompanying the 

photographs, he made a bold and melancholic confession that the imagination of going home 

remains just that, an impossible imagination: “I knew I would never be able to claim a part of 

Kashmir for myself, it would never be my home; a familiar feeling of loss, disorientation and 

emotional fragmentation was re-released, the same feeling I’d felt for years growing up in 

England. I was a lost boy, living among lost generations, who are not able to call any place 

home.” Hussain, through his photographic and installation work, created a home.  

Kumar (2000) reminds us of more complexities in the idea of home. Kumar wrote that 

the phrase “There’s no place like home” is actually filled with ambiguity, especially if we pause 

to consider its loaded nature. At one end is the idea that “there can be no other place like home” 

but at the same time, it can also mean that “the idea of home is a delusion, it never existed in its 

safely pure form.” In Hussain’s work, we see a visual manifestation of the ambiguity of home. 

“Photography is at the nerve center of our paradoxical memorial impulses: we need it there for 

how it helps us frame our losses, but we can also sense it crowding in on ongoing experience, 

 

 

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imposing closure on what should still  be open” (Cole, 2016, p. 200). Hussain is inside the work 

and also outside of it. He is constructing a home for himself and others in the diaspora. And at 

the same time, he seems to have recognized that here too, he is a visitor.  

What Hussain offers is a preserve that allows diaspora(s), Azad Kashmiris and otherwise, 

to access questions, longings, and memories of home, no matter where they come from. Hussain 

offers a visual preserve that is deeply personal, that is constructed out of imagination, images, 

and mud. An archive that crosses borders with ease and yet remains uneasy in any one location. I 

see his work as “visualizing” Brah’s conception of diaspora space and teasing out the 

relationships between those who travel and those who stay back. The importance of Hussain’s 

work lies in its ability to create home in a layered manner, taking us through the visual and back 

into the material, and eventually to the impossibility of finding home for the diasporic subject. It 

invites us to contend with the cultural, political, economic, and psychic processes that undergird 

diasporic lives without offering an easy resolution. In fact, Hussain’s work offers new visions, 

directions, and questions for us to consider. Ultimately, it is a gift to diasporic youth, who will, 

according to Hussain (2017), “offer a more fluid understanding of what is meant by ‘home’” 

(n.p.).  

Re-creating Mangla Dam: A Visual-Material Tracing of Diasporic Histories and Memories 

The origins of Going Back Home to Where I Came From can be traced to Hussain’s 

related project, The Auspicious Journey. In 2015 he travelled in a boat through the canal system 

in Birmingham, U.K as part of the Ikon Gallery’s artist residency. Tracing connections to his 

homeland in Azad Kashmir, Hussain welcomed South Asian migrants onboard and asked them 

to make model clay houses replicating the homes they left behind in their ancestral lands in Azad 

Kashmir. To put his own unique spin on this endeavour, Hussain photographed the individuals 

who created model mud houses using the tin type process. Hussain’s description of the model 

 

 

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mud houses and the five tintype portraits at the beginning of Going Back Home to Where I Came 

From deal with loss and memory experienced by the Azad Kashmiri diaspora. “Memories, in 

diaspora, may be place-based, but they are not necessarily place-bound” (Fortier, 2010, p. 184).  

Hussain’s work is about finding and (re)creating home in other contexts while simultaneously 

tracing the histories of homes that have been left behind. What follows is my reading of how 

Hussain’s photographs and installation work recreate diasporic histories, offering a more 

complicated retelling of why and how they ended up “here”, in the U.K. A history that is not 

simply about travels westward but a complex tracing of histories that tie the here to there and an 

elsewhere. 

In one photograph, titled Mangla Dam, I see the simultaneity of presence and absence 

visualized. Hussain photographed a religious structure standing in shallow water. I am not sure 

how long the structure has remained submerged in the water—a few hours, days, weeks, or 

years. Regardless, the proximity of this structure to the water is evident. It appears old and 

dilapidated with loose bricks strewn around it. On one side, the walls are broken down. Peering 

through the reflection, I see the remnants of a larger structure, perhaps this was a bigger complex 

now subsumed by the water. In the background, I mostly see the blue of the water and the sky. 

On the horizon are concrete buildings in what appears to be a town. The submerged structure 

lingers in the water, aware of the challenges to its own existence ushered by the dam even as 

other buildings emerge in the distance. This image, which was often a centerpiece in his gallery 

showings, conveys the history of the region by depicting what is present and absent, what is 

gained and lost.  

How does Hussain preserve that which has already been eroded? How does Hussain deal 

in memory with this sense of loss? How does Hussain make visible the transnational flows and 

 

 

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their impact on the lives of the people living in his homeland? In Mitti ka Ghar, Hussain decided 

to recreate a life-sized mud house in a gallery in Britain, an attempt to upend the loss felt by 

photographs. It is about learning what the process of constructing an old thing in a new place 

teaches us—which is that the thing no longer remains the same but becomes anew. This yearning 

for home and for upending loss is not a feeling that Hussain deals with exclusively. As Banerjee 

reminds us, the diasporic photographer’s “efforts are constantly undermined by the fact that 

representing a moment photographically takes the form of a haunting: photographs ironically 

heighten loss by resuscitating memory” (Banerjee 2010, p. 446). He is, through his photographic 

and installation work, bringing into view the “historically contingent genealogies” of the Azad 

Kashmiri diaspora in the U.K. (Brah, 1996, p. 196).  

The construction of Mangla dam on the Jhelum river, a project initiated jointly by the 

Indian and Pakistani Governments in the 1960s and funded by various international 

organizations, led “to the submersion of over 280 towns and villages and the displacement of 

110,000 people” living in the region (n.p.). The dam, constructed after the end of the colonial-

rule in the region, was a modernist project that was partly driven by political and economic 

interests of Western countries. As Brah (1996) reminds us, “contemporary forms of transnational 

migrancy of capital, commodities, peoples, and cultures is the very condition of both the 

persistence and erosion of the nation state” (p. 243). Ultimately, Hussain’s work attempts to trace 

these histories by using the very materials that have impacted the lives of the diaspora and those 

who stayed back. Through the model mud houses and tin type photographs, Hussain implored 

the Azad Kashmiri diaspora to tell their stories of home, loss, belonging. Together, they (re)made 

these stories from mud, from metal, from water, and from memory. In the book, I only see two 

images of the mud house being constructed in the gallery. The rest of the images are from 

 

 

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Hussain’s travels to Mirpur as he researched the mud houses and learned more about the lives 

and histories of the people who stayed back. The history of the region is visualized through 

presence and absence. I don’t see any images of the mud houses Hussain talks about. There are 

two images from Azad Kashmir that come close to what Hussain describes and later reconstructs 

in the gallery. However, these images also show the still surviving mud houses against a 

backdrop of multi-storeyed concrete houses. The mud house becomes a symbol for the diaspora 

and the transnational flows affecting their lives. The dam reshaped the river, the region, and led 

to the displacement and subsequent migration of people.  

While Hussain chose to tell the story from the perspective of the diaspora living in the 

U.K., he learned that to tell the stories of home, loss, and memory also entails an understanding 

of the related effects on those who stayed back/never left. Hussain found that remittances from 

abroad have led to the development of concrete buildings in place of the mud houses, a recurrent 

theme across his photographs. The dam becomes a thread with which Hussain stitches together a 

genealogy of the Kashmiri diaspora that transgresses national boundaries. Together, the tin type 

photographs and the model mud houses tell the history of the Mangla dam using visual, 

affective, and material registers. Hussain’s work gently pushes us to consider the connected 

threads of diasporic history and to reckon with globalization and diaspora being two sides of the 

same coin. Using these materials (water and clay) that were so central to the displacement of his 

people in other contexts, Hussain harkens to a time elsewhere, where similar materials sustained 

life differently. 

 Mitti ka Ghar, Hussain’s installation, is a bold statement about how the lives of diaspora 

are impacted by factors that span national boundaries. To create home in a space as foreign and 

as alienating as an art gallery is an act of preservation, a quiet resistance. Hussain was able to 

 

 

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imaginatively recreate the transnational trajectory of this particular diaspora and illustrate “what 

the search for origins signifies in [their] history” (Brah, 1996, p. 197).  Mitti ka Ghar is about 

using photography to create a home, in its form and materiality, that lingers in the imaginations 

of those who have migrated to the U.K. and also those who have stayed back. And for both sets 

of people, the mud house no longer exists in its pure form, it has been remade through 

transnational flows of money, people, and ideas. “It is a story about being at home, and the 

erosion thereof” (Uekotter, 2017). Hussain’s work is a reminder that to understand the lives of 

diaspora entails a journeying across borders, real and imagined. It entails tracing not simply the 

roots of a diasporic community but also the routes that led them elsewhere (Gilroy, 2000, p. 

190). It is about tracing a history that is faint, eroded, and “questions linear conceptions of 

history, continuity and progress" (Fortier, 2010, p. 184). It is about attending to the imaginative 

ways in which diasporas create/preserve/remake something that can be called home.  

Reimagining Boundaries: Curriculum, Diasporas, and Photography 

How do we see Hussain’s work as curriculum? How can we conceive of his work as a 

resource for youth, teachers, and teacher educators to engage, understand, and imagine the lives 

of diaspora beyond the boundaries of the nation-state? How can the questions that Hussain asked 

of himself and his community be questions that we are willing to ask as educators? How can we 

create opportunities for students to ask these questions, engage in creative imagination, and an 

exploration of histories, cultures, and politics that traverse national boundaries? In many ways, 

this chapter is my attempt at offering one possible way of engaging Hussain’s work in order to 

address some of these questions.  

 

Going Back Home to Where I Came From can be traced to Hussain’s experiences as a 

migrant in Britain. Repeatedly being told to “go back home to where you came from”, Hussain 

realized that the statement actually undergirds other questions—who are you? Where have you 

 

 

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come from? Why are you here? Where do you really belong? Diaspora(s) are often forced to 

answer these questions of identity and belonging. These questions assume that a person’s racial 

and ethnic identities make them ‘identifiable’ outsiders to a region. Often these questions are 

asked in personal and everyday contexts but at other times can also emerge from social and 

political institutions. For example, schools try and impose a “unitary national memory” that 

treats the nation-state as the unit of analysis (Huyssen, 2003, p. 23). The category of the nation-

state as a primary mode of identification forces diasporic youth to choose between a here, a 

there, and an elsewhere (Abu El-Haj, 2007). Several educational scholars have theorized the 

impact of this racism and xenophobia on the lives of migrant students (Abu El-Haj, 2007; Bajaj 

et al., 2016; Collet, 2007). These “everyday ruptures” force migrant youth to confirm a singular 

national identity, often questioning their allegiances to the nation-state of their residence 

(Hamman & Zúñiga, 2011). Hussain’s experiences echo this research and reflect an ongoing 

social, cultural, and political conflict with ‘British nationals’ who view him and others as 

‘perpetual outsiders’ to the nation-state (Sue et al., 2007). However, what makes Hussain’s work 

unique and interesting is his use of photography and installation in responding to these questions 

as a way to move beyond the textual and to draw on visual, material, and affective registers. 

 

Hussain, through his photographic work, set out to answer the questions undergirding the 

statement “go back to where you came from”. The contested nature of the experiences of the 

South Asian diaspora in Britain have been widely documented by several scholars (Brah, 2012; 

Hall, 2012). Hussain’s work “allows for the interrogation rather than the assumption of the 

nation-state, and attention to youths' and parents' hybrid cultural practices that rupture 

geographies and generations” (Villenas, 2007, p. 419). In preserving and creating home through 

the visual, Hussain is also attending to the questions that animate Brah’s (1996) work on 

 

 

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diaspora: “who travels…when, how and under what circumstances? What socio-economic, 

political and cultural conditions mark the trajectories of these journeys? What regimes of power 

inscribe the formation of a specific diaspora?” (p. 182; emphasis in original). By connecting the 

Azad Kashmiri diaspora in Britain to the construction of the Mangla dam, Hussain’s work 

“interrogate[s] two nations now instead of one” (Villenas, 2007, p. 421). He is able to construct, 

what Lukose (2007) calls, “imaginative geographies of homeland often as a counter to national 

imaginative geographies” (p. 412). Hussain’s photographic and installation work offer an 

imaginative creation that counter the impositions, of nation-states and schools, on diasporas to 

assimilate into a singular narrative of home/nation-state.  

            In “creating patterns of attachment across time and space” through his photographic and 

installation work, Hussain offers “threads of continuity” across nation-states and generations 

(Baronian et al., 2007, p. 12). Seen through this lens, Hussain’s work can be conceptualized as 

currere, the infinitive plural of curriculum, “which seeks to understand the contribution 

academic studies makes to one’s understanding of his or her life (and vice versa) and how both 

are imbricated in society, politics and culture” (Pinar, 2012, p. 36). Through his artistic practice, 

Hussain is performing a pedagogical exercise that is at once autobiographical and political, 

thereby offering “an intensified engagement with daily life, not an ironic separation from it” (p. 

37). His work quietly challenges the dominant curriculum within schools that often emphasize a 

singular national identity and force migrant youth to assimilate. He offers an imagination of 

diasporic lives that are situated across locality, geography, and nation-states. Hussain interrupts 

the dominant discourse around migration and diaspora which “often involves a linear 

understanding of migration as a one-way flow from third world to the first world” (Villenas, 

2009, p. 133). And in unlearning the dominant tropes and relearning the transnational histories of 

 

 

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the Azad Kashmiri diaspora, he created photographs and installation work that challenge several 

binaries—here/there, citizen/migrant, first world/third world—and that interrogates the complex 

histories of migration that are deeply connected to globalization, economies, labor, and cultural 

productions occurring in spaces between and across nations. In uncovering the histories of his 

own family and community, Hussain offers the Kashmiri diaspora “a sense of themselves within 

history, a sense of hemispheric belonging” (Villenas, 2009, p. 135).  

Through Mitti ka Ghar, Hussain extends this engagement with the broader community. In 

the book, he describes how volunteers, several of whom were youth, were involved in the 

construction of the mud house in the gallery. Through this process, Hussain is able to engage the 

concept of diaspora space, relying on “a multi-axial performative notion of power” (p. 242). The 

mud house in the gallery in Britain is ultimately starting a conversation between the Azad 

Kashmiri diaspora and other communities in Britain. Hussain was able to visualize how the 

presence of the Kashmiri diaspora in the U.K. is tied to economic, social, and, political effects 

that cannot be pinned to a single nation-state or organization. In making these axes of influences 

and (dis)location visible, Hussain sanctions a different response to the questions often asked of 

the Azad Kashmiri diaspora—why are you here? And at the same time, he is imploring other 

communities to reckon with these questions beyond the dominant discourses that are circulated 

within schools, popular culture, and media.  

Ultimately, Hussain’s photographic work offers a curriculum: a rewriting, a creation, an 

imagination, and preservation of diasporic histories that is woven together with threads of 

continuity and discontinuity. The photographs in Going Back Home to Where I Came From offer 

a retelling of the story of the Azad Kashmiri diaspora and it is told from multiple axes—the 

homeland, those who moved, and the ways in which this migration impacted the lives of those 

 

 

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who stayed back. In weaving these axes together in his retelling, Hussain is offering past, 

present, and future generations a preservation, imagination, and recreation of their histories that 

resists any single unitary narrative.  

Hussain’s photographic work performs currere visually. He offers us an aestheticized 

narrative of personal history, a particular retelling of diasporic history which challenges given 

understandings of diaspora and the nation-state. Viewed such, the deeply personal and political 

nature of his work becomes apparent. Mani (2010), discussing Gauri Gill’s work who engages in 

similar questions, reminds us “postcolonial interventions in photographic practice reveal 

alternate narratives of nationhood, and yet our frameworks of seeing are still constrained by 

geographically bound notions of ‘national culture’” (p. 143). Hussain’s work offers a retelling of 

diasporic history. There are many, many other retellings, big and small. As educators, how do we 

attune and attend to these retellings that offer us ‘visions’ beyond grandiose nationalistic 

narratives? 

As a scholar of education, I am interested in engaging in various kinds of boundary-

crossing, including global diaspora and transdisciplinarity. Lukose (2007) articulates the 

importance of adopting diasporic frameworks within education because it “simultaneously 

argues against perspectives that assume a national, assimilationist model of immigrant 

incorporation while highlighting phenomena like music, literature, and film that may escape the 

logic of national assimilation" (Lukose, 2007, p. 410). To this list, I add photography and have 

illustrated the productive tensions that Hussain’s work offers in understanding, feeling, and 

imagining diasporic lives. Ultimately, Hussain’s artistic work invites us to rethink our notions of 

home, belonging, and diaspora; to imagine otherwise.  

 

 

 

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autoethnography of transnational lives and teacher education in the U.S. The Teacher 
Educator, 53(3), 313–327.  

Villenas, Sofia A. (2007). Diaspora and the anthropology of Latino education: Challenges, 
affinities, and intersections. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 38(4), 419–425.  

Villenas, Sofía A. (2009). Knowing and unknowing transnational Latino lives in teacher 

education: At the intersection of educational research and the Latino humanities. The 
High School Journal, 92(4), 129–136. 

 

 

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CHAPTER 3 Methodology as a Lifestyle Choice: Aesthetics, Community, and Stories 

My first foray into asking questions pertinent to educational research started while I was an 

elementary educator. As a first-year elementary teacher in a working-class neighborhood in 

Pune, India, I was expected to use materials developed by the U.S.-based organization Reading 

A-Z. My students and I read stories of blueberry pies and John running up and down a hill. The 

context was remarkably different. Neither I nor my students, had ever seen/eaten a blueberry. In 

that moment, I asked myself why we were using curricular materials so removed from our 

everyday lives. How did those curriculum materials about blueberries get into my Pune 

elementary school? These early questions sent me down the path of exploring transnational 

networks of educational reform. I wanted to understand why certain policies and practices 

became mobile across geographical, social, and cultural contexts. Who/what makes these 

practices and reform ideas mobile? In attempting to address these fledgling questions, I turned 

towards social network analysis as a methodological approach. I read the work of several 

scholars who were already engaged in similar work (Ball, 2016; Dunn, 2013; Nambissan & Ball, 

2010). I started with the belief that if I were able to uncover and show the networks of 

individuals/organizations/nation-states that are exerting this influence then eventually classroom 

practices might shift (see Vellanki, 2015). This led me towards pursuing a doctoral degree in the 

U.S., with the aim of conducting research in the country which I saw as exerting an influence on 

educational policies and practices within India.  

As a second-year doctoral student, I went into my guidance committee meeting with a 

research agenda focused on examining transnational networks of influence. I had an idea for the 

sites I would engage with, the methodological approaches I would use, and the kinds of courses I 

would taking during my doctoral studies to make this research possible. However, during that 

 

 

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meeting, Lynn Fendler made a crucial intervention that would result in seismic shifts in my 

understanding of educational research as well as my own research trajectory. She said, “Vivek, a 

lot of people will say that you should pick your research method based on the questions you are 

asking.” And as she said that, every research method class that I had been in and the various 

books on qualitative research methodology came flashing back to me. She was right, I had heard 

and read a variation of that line several times before. She followed up with, “I think that is one 

way to do it, but not the only way.” I was confused about where she was going with this. 

“Methodology can also be a lifestyle choice, ask yourself: what do you want to do for six-eight 

hours a day, five days a week?” Her comment was brief and immensely powerful. Her 

articulation, I realize in hindsight, was the clearest criticism of most things I had been taught in 

school as well as throughout my research training.  

Lynn’s comment stayed with me, for days, weeks, months, and years following that meeting. 

I don’t think I fully understood what she meant. However, her comments resonated with me and 

with the rest of the committee, which agreed with her observation. Alyssa Dunn chimed in and 

said, “I agree with Lynn. You are very interested in this topic but also your eyes light up in a 

different way when you talk about photographs, home, migration, popular culture, and other 

things.” I was surprised that they noticed this and even more surprised that they were asking me 

to explore these interests, pushing me to move closer towards them.  

Lynn’s comment is a larger indictment of the educational system as well as research practices 

within the field. In this chapter, I explore what Lynn’s comment offers the field of educational 

research. I do this by closely reading scholars who have pushed the boundaries of qualitative 

research by questioning the epistemological, ontological, and ideological assumptions 

undergirding research practices. By drawing on work in the fields of post-qualitative research, 

 

 

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arts-based practices, and humanities-oriented research, I make a case for flights of imagination 

when it comes to methodological approaches within the field. I argue that these pluralities of 

practices offer educators and researchers new avenues, imaginations, and knowledges that push 

us towards dreaming and building socially just futures. I will articulate some of my own 

considerations, curiosities, desires, and approaches that helped me realize methodology as a 

lifestyle choice. However, I remain cautious in offering this as an “alternative” that will be 

proceduralized. In illustrating the deeply subjective nature of this approach/work, I will use 

examples from my scholarly work to share what methodology as a lifestyle choice means to me. 

I do this by elaborating the methodological framework shaping my current work, which I call 

ASC: Aesthetics, Stories, and Communities. Finally, I offer some thoughts for the broader field 

of educational research.  

 

There are several reasons as to why Lynn’s comment had such a profound impact on me. 

What is Methodology? 

It is partly due to my own desires and affinities towards artistic practices such as photography, 

video, theater, performance, etc. I came to these artistic practices much before I came to 

educational research and I continued to engage in them long after I learned more about 

educational research. Over the last few years, I have been involved with developing arts-based 

programs for teachers, a social justice and theater program for youth, a podcast focused on 

educational research. Despite these engagements, I saw the work of a researcher as being 

somewhat different. In hindsight, I worked from the assumption that the task of the researcher 

was to uncover a particular ‘truth’ with the hope that once this ‘truth’ is out in the world, things, 

people, practices, and policies will change. It is with this conviction that I set out to do the work 

on transnational educational reform. However, I realized that this approach, while being 

important and necessary, forecloses the possibility for other considerations. It mostly leaves out 

 

 

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desire, joy, curiosity, pleasure, imagination, refusal, creation as integral aspects of lived 

experience and as considerations that can also drive research.  

 

This realization took me back to my earlier years as a student of life sciences. I 

remembered reading somewhere in my biology textbook, perhaps no more than one or two lines, 

about Barbara McClintock’s decision to study corn which eventually led her to the discovery of 

transposons and a Nobel prize. I remember reading that the reason she decided to study corn was 

because she was drawn to these plants, these organisms fascinated her and she felt for them 

deeply (Keller, 2003). However, this aspect of her researcher identity and interests were tucked 

away amidst the more clinical descriptions of jumping genes and her experiments. McClintock is 

no exception. There are several other scientists who have similar stories that are usually absent 

from textbooks of science and reserved rather for their biographies, letters, and other personal 

communication. A historical legacy built on the separation between the subjective researcher and 

the object of research (Harding, 2016).  

The first time I engaged in social network analysis, I was able to map the relationships 

between various organizations and individuals, which operated seemingly under the guise of 

political/ideological neutrality i.e. reformers without an agenda. The research was interesting, I 

was following the money, ideas, policies, and in the process learned a lot about the transnational 

landscape of educational reform. And through this research, I was able to demonstrate how John 

and the blueberry pies ended up in our classroom, not through chance, but through specific 

ideologies, policies, and practices being set in motion by powerful organizations and institutions. 

However, I remember feeling a sense of emotional dread as I did this research. In part, because 

of the realization that the elite pretending to change the world are continuing to perpetuate the 

status quo, an idea that Giridharadas (2018) captures with great insight in his book Winners take 

 

 

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all. It felt like I was uncovering a fragment of a network that has been studied for much longer 

by other scholars (Au & Ferrare, 2015; Ball, 2012; Nambissan & Ball, 2010; Peck & Theodore, 

2010; Rizvi & Lingard, 2010; Subramanian, 2018). I felt that my work was an advertisement for 

power—laying out the networks that exist, exposing them but I wasn’t sure what else it was 

doing.  

I don’t intend to discredit this line of work, especially the work of scholars and writers who 

have dedicated their lives to helping us understand and question these networks of reform. Its 

importance is undeniable. In fact, several individuals emailed me about the article I wrote, a 

testament to its small impact. However, the intervention from Lynn and my guidance committee 

made me ask myself different questions about the imperatives and purposes for doing research. 

Tuck and Yang (2014) remind us that “Research may not be the intervention that is needed. This 

axiom challenges the latent theory of change that research— more academic knowing—will 

somehow innately contribute to the improvement of tribes, communities, youth, schools, etc” (p. 

813). In many ways, I was driven by this latent theory of change. I was working from the 

assumption that my research would uncover the networks of influence and would lead to the 

improvement of communities, curricular shifts, and potential institutional changes.  

 

I learned that this was not the case, especially if we consider all the ways researchers 

have already helped us attend to the various gaps, challenges, and opportunities in reimagining 

schooling. Once again, this is not to say that this kind of research doesn’t have any impact at all. 

But instead, to ask ourselves what else can research be/do? And here too, I recognize that this 

question has been addressed in many different ways by scholars, activists, community 

organizers, artists, etc. Within the world of educational research, scholars have attended to this 

question much more actively over the last few decades. In particular, feminist, queer, indigenous, 

 

 

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and scholars of color have historically pushed the academy to consider various knowledge 

systems, research imperatives, and ethical relationships with the communities we work in and 

with (Anzaldúa, 2015; Lather, 2016; Paris & Winn, 2014; Patel, 2016; Smith, 2012; Tuck, 2009). 

My own work emerges from and is shaped by these understandings, imperatives, and 

imaginations.  

 

In my own experience, these works, questions, and imaginations, are typically side-lined 

within most university courses, conferences, and publications that are deemed “important” 

within the field. My own scholarly trajectory has been shaped by this disciplining. And yet, when 

I look back, I recognize that even within these spaces, scholars often acknowledged the 

ambiguities and uncertainties around qualitative research methodologies. For example, Peshkin 

(1988) makes a confession, “However, what choice of methodology comes down to for many of 

us, I suspect, is personal taste: the sense of adventure which I like in research is present for me 

under the circumstances of the ethnographic approach” (p. 36). Such a justification for 

methodology, one that is rooted in deeply subjective and affective reasons and not justified 

through quasi-scientific arguments are scattered throughout research articles. However, these 

confessions are often nestled amongst other claims and lost within "the epistemological quarrel 

over the conditions of scientificity" (Dosse, 1999, p. 352). Leavy et al., (2014) argue qualitative 

research has a deeply contested history and has constantly strived to establish itself as scientific 

and rigorous in relation to the standards and practices of quantitative research. This is one of the 

reasons for the development of, what Weaver and Snaza (2017) call, Methodocentrism, which is 

a “philosophy and politics that attempts to stave off the risk of inquiry by justifying, in advance 

of any engagement with the world, the 'validity' of the researcher's study” (p. 1049).  

 

 

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The contestations around the validity, rigor, and applicability of research are still 

ongoing. Since the 1970s, qualitative researchers have offered more reflective and critical 

explorations of methodology, specifically exploring the ontological and epistemological roots of 

these approaches. However, despite these shifts most graduate training is seen as a means of 

“disciplining perception and inculcating particular ways of making meaning in relation to a 

multiplicity of possibilities, most of which must ultimately be rejected” (Weaver & Snaza, 2017, 

p. 1058). In this paper, I explore this multiplicity of possibilities, and turn towards that which has 

been rejected or, perhaps more accurately, ignored by the academy. Because, the academy only 

came later, always. The work of being, imagining, knowing, creating outside this settler-colonial 

endeavour has been long held together by individuals and communities across the world. Often, 

far too often, the academy has discredited, damaged, mined the lives and knowledges of various 

communities. In exploring this multiplicity of possibilities, I am not offering anything “new” but 

rather attuning to ways of being, knowing, and creating that have been sustained for a long time. 

In her book In the Wake, Christina Sharpe makes the argument that Black scholars are being 

asked to work using methods that discredit their own knowledges—“the methods most readily 

available to us sometimes, oftentimes, force us into positions that run counter to what we know” 

(p. 12). In response, Sharpe asks us to “become undisciplined” (p. 13). This undisciplining is not 

merely a call to untether ourselves from disciplinary affiliations. It is a plea to unlearn the “logic 

of proceduralism” (Springgay & Truman, 2018, p. 205) and to engage in “a mode of 

defamiliarization that ruptures taken-for-granted habits, tropes, and common assumptions about 

how methods perform” (p. 208).  

Talking about disciplinary training in relation to methodology, Brinkmann (2014) writes, 

“We have curricula of ‘data collection’ and coding, but what about learning to stumble?” (p. 

 

 

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724). Taking up these calls, I decided to re-turn to photography, to pursue my own desire, 

disdain, and curiosity for the medium. However, rather than simply turning to scholarly work 

within this tradition, I turned to the work of artists, writers, and photographers like Teju Cole, 

Sohrah Hura, Gloria Anzaldúa, Carolyn Drake, Carrie Mae Weems, Amitava Kumar, Christina 

Sharpe, and others. These initial explorations led me to question the methodological monopoly 

of photovoice within educational research. In particular, the overreliance on photovoice as a way 

to do visual research. “I think we need more wonder in qualitative research, and especially in our 

engagements with data, as a counterpart to the exercise of reason through interpretation, 

classification, and representation” (MacLure, 2013, p. 228). I followed the practices of a young 

photographer, Urja Davesar, to imagine ways of engaging photography and the practices of 

youth beyond the realm of photovoice and its attendant practices of coding, themes, and textual 

analysis (see Vellanki, under review). Subsequently, I continued exploring my curiosity with 

photographs using the objects of passport photos, which I will describe in greater detail in later 

sections. These experiences helped me think about and articulate some aspects of methodology 

as a lifestyle choice.  

Methodology as a Lifestyle Choice: Some Considerations 

The idea of methodology as a lifestyle choice asks us to unhinge ourselves from 

disciplinary justifications for research methods. For example, considerations like validity, 

reliability, replicability, and rigor may not be sufficient nor are they the only yardsticks for the 

work we do. Since Lynn used that phrase in my guidance committee meeting, I repeatedly asked 

her to write a paper about this. I told her that we needed to hear more. To which, she often 

responded with “I don’t know what else there is to say, everything I have to say I have already 

said about that—methodology is a lifestyle choice.” In 2017, Lynn and I made a short film about 

this idea, I followed her across spaces, asked her questions, and probed her to say more about 

 

 

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methodology as a lifestyle choice. We shared an early draft of this movie at ICQI and since then 

we have shared this work in several graduate classes. And here I am, writing the paper that I 

asked Lynn to write. I am writing the paper that she refused to write. I am trying to make a case 

for methodology as a lifestyle choice, I am courting its death at the hands of the academy.  

Figure 4 Screenshot from Methodology as a Lifestyle Choice. Image courtesy: Vivek Vellanki 

and Lynn Fendler 

 

What else is there to say? I hesitate to offer a definition, an operationalization, or 

conceptualization of methodology as a lifestyle choice. It seems counter-intuitive. And yet, there 

is something else to be said. The idea of methodology as a lifestyle choice is a vast terrain, and 

what I offer below is not so much a definition as a partial map of this landscape, a snapshot of 

the features of this landscape that I have stumbled across. And as Dennis Wood (2013) reminds 

us, maps are not objective either, they are arguments. If I made a right turn there instead of a left, 

the map would have looked different.  

 

 

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My own stumblings and navigations across this terrain have led me to interesting places. 

I have found, along the way, various landmarks, features, and lookouts. A reminder that this is 

not an unexplored terrain, this is not a terrain to be discovered or colonized. Instead, there are 

paths that people have created for me/us, that lead us to interesting places, and faint hints of 

tracks that also invite us to seek out and create other paths. And some paths that are not created 

for me, that I will admire, respect and learn about and from but never venture out there on my 

own. Here, I want to offer thxree aspects that I found on this journey so far and that have 

informed my travels in these spaces.  

The first is intimately tied to what happened and was said in my guidance committee 

meeting. I was pushed to follow and pursue my own affinities, curiosities, and desires, at a time 

when I didn’t have the language to acknowledge and articulate them. However, my committee 

members noticed these small movements, in the way I write, talk, move, while discussing/doing 

certain things versus other things. My graduate training, and more generally schooling, pushed 

me to separate the mind from the body. Often times, the body was seen merely as a tool to 

transport the mind. Often, the body had to be tamed in relation to the mind. The idea of 

methodology as a lifestyle choice propels us to consider the relationship between the body and 

the mind. It challenges the “dominant model of education” (and I would add research), that 

according to Andreotti (2016), “aims to expand the mind at the expense of the body, and that 

attempts to tame or repress forces deemed unreasonable such as the aesthetic, the erotic, the 

more-than-human, the divine and the hilarious” (p. 83). Even though we have tried to create 

these separations, between the mind and the body, across various institutions and within the 

broader publics, our everyday lives do not follow these separations. In fact, turning towards these 

desires and curiosities as a source of knowledge, understanding, and creation is an argument and 

 

 

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practice that feminist, indigenous, and scholars of color have embodied for a long, long time 

(Bhattacharya, 2019; hooks, 2013; King, 2005).  

That brings me to my second point, the separation between knowledge production and 

knowledge practices, which the academy has perpetuated for far too long. Most often, for any 

particular thing/action to be considered as knowledge, it has to be written about, theorized or 

researched. In my own experience, this has entailed a separation between that which I will 

research and that which I will do; that which has the academy’s sanction and that which does not. 

I often think about my grandmother’s knowledge practices, especially her passion and love for 

making pickles. Growing up, I never saw this as an important knowledge practice. Schooling had 

taught me that the only valuable knowledge was that which was sanctioned and approved by 

institutions and then filtered through textbooks. I loved pickles, I would eat them with nearly 

every meal and my grandmother would make them based on the season and the availability of 

fruits and vegetables. However, I never saw the process of picklemaking as being complex, 

important, or something valuable for me to learn.  

Methodology as a lifestyle choice seeks to blur the distinctions between the idea of 

knowledge production and practice by identifying that practice (what we do for eight hours a 

day) is not separate from knowledge production but often at the heart of it. In this process, we are 

also compelled to think about the relationship between the body and the mind, the material and 

the affective, the aesthetic and the banal. I also learned that if the academy touched or found 

certain knowledge practices, it would remake them in its own garb, consume it, and regurgitate a 

scholarly version that would be made more palpable to schooled understandings. Anzaldúa 

writes of this: “The essence of colonization: rip off a culture, then regurgitate its white version to 

the ‘natives’” (p.48). Here, a word of caution is necessary. As we explore the idea of 

 

 

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methodology as a lifestyle choice and the potential blurring of the false separation between 

knowledge production and knowledge practices, we are offering up more for the settler-colonial 

academy to claim and consume. It is important for us to keep asking ourselves questions: “Who 

gets to know? Who gets known? Where is knowledge kept, and kept legitimated? What 

knowledge is desirable? Who profits? Who loses/ pays/gives something away? Who is coerced, 

empowered, appointed to give away knowledge?” (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 812). These questions 

are not merely about justifying our research to IRB offices, grant organizations, faculty 

committees using preexisting justifications. Instead, they ask us to consider the long-term impact 

of our work in the lives of communities and individuals. And once again, remind us to ask: is 

research the intervention needed here? I don’t wish to write/read a research article about 

picklemaking but I do wish that I had spent more time learning from my grandmother’s practice. 

I wish schooling had taught me to acknowledge, appreciate, and engage various forms of 

knowledge practices.  

And finally, the idea that we ask ourselves what we want to be doing for eight hours a 

day, five or six days a week can seem like a trite question that has been repeated in self-help 

books and other spaces. However, if we pause to consider the loaded nature of the question, it 

offers a lot for us to think about as researchers and educators. The question reorients our focus as 

researchers, away from the singular idea of knowledge production towards relationality. By 

asking us to think about what we are doing in the process of research, we open up a whole set of 

questions that, in my opinion, are particularly important but seldom asked with seriousness. Once 

again, to answer this question honestly we cannot rely on existing frameworks that help us think 

about the doing of research—data collection, analysis, and writing. If the questions at the heart 

of my research endeavors are not simply: what do I want to study? What do I write about? Where 

 

 

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is there a gap in literature? But also: how do I want to live? How do I want to be in relation with 

my community? How do I want to spend my waking minutes? What kind a world do we want to 

imagine and build? it might lead us to ask different questions of ourselves and of others and it 

might radically reshape our research practices. 

Perhaps methodology as a lifestyle choice is also asking (some of) us to slow down, to 

reject the neoliberal university that is propelling us to work like machines (Shahjahan, 2015). 

Often, the pursuit for more grants, more publications, more research projects is a source of 

potential harm to the communities we live and work with and also to ourselves (Berg & Seeber, 

2016). Methodology as a lifestyle choice rejects the given notions of the settler-colonial academy 

which “exhorts us to arrive at an answer to a research question that can be marketed as 

efficiently as possible” (p. 60). Instead, it asks us to linger, to be tentative, and to draw on an 

ethics that are not preordained by disciplinary frameworks but emerging from our subjectivities 

and an ethics of relationality, an ethics in the making.  

What I have outlined above is a snapshot, a scene of the landscape from where I stand, 

looking back and beyond. And as I continue to move, I imagine that the landscape will change 

and as will the ways I see, feel, and understand the terrain and all the life that inhabits this place. 

Below, I describe in greater detail my own journey over the past few years.  

In 2018, I decided to follow my curiosities with photographs/photography and combined 

The Passport Photo Project 

it with my interests in migration, borders, and education. Through an ongoing and emergent 

understanding, I engaged with the work of artists, photographers, and writers to help me feel, 

think, and theorize. I paid more attention to the affective and bodily resonances of this work, 

what Stewart (2007) calls, “a something both animated and inhabitable” (p. 1). This exploration, 

The Passport Photo Project, is something that developed through stumblings, without a singular 

 

 

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well-defined path, a linear trajectory. Therefore, what I offer here is an assemblage of The 

Passport Photo Project constructed in hindsight. An assemblage that is fragmentary, imagined, 

and inconclusive.  

Passport Photos 

In 2015 as I applied for a U.S. visa, I was required to have a passport photo made. I 

decided to shave my beard for that photograph. No one really asked me to, but I did anyway. I 

did this because of the stories I had heard from friends, families, and strangers. That moment has 

lingered with me for the past few years. And at the same time, I have always been drawn to 

passport photographs. After completing my undergraduate studies, getting ready to bid goodbyes 

to my friends I asked them to share their passport photos with me. These photos have travelled 

with me over the past few years. I don’t know what I was drawn to in these photographs—

seemingly flat and emotionless. However, I saw in them an excess that cannot be articulated in 

language. An excess that has to, according to Campt (2017), be heard and not simply seen.  

The passport photo is a recent invention, a little over 120-years old. The history of this 

object is a history that is at the interstices of photography, evidence, surveillance, and migration 

(Torpey, 2000). Passport photos are objects that are mired in legacies of racism, colonialism, and 

imperialism (Pegler-Gordon, 2006). This technology, developed by Alphonse Bertillon, was used 

as a way to identify criminals during the late 19th century in Paris, France. It was quickly adopted 

by governments all over the world. However, its full force would be seen in the early 20th 

century as governments used passport photos to regulate and restrict the movement of migrants. 

The passport and the passport photo became the cornerstone of a complex machinery controlling 

the movement of humans (Salter, 2003).  

The history of passport photos is a history of migration. I lived this history before I 

learned about it. In the lives of migrants, passport photos are objects not merely of control and 

 

 

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surveillance but also of hopes and desires. Campt (2017) explores this contradiction, this 

doubled-ness of passport photographs (and perhaps all photographs), by listening to the affective 

intensities of these objects and what they reveal about the lives of migrants.  

Another example might be helpful here. One might consider the passport photograph to 

be a flat document. It is read by authority figures as a representation, as a means of identification, 

matching the likeness of the person in front to the person in the photograph. At the airport and at 

the bar, the person guarding the entrance always holds up my passport photo to my face, trying 

to establish a similarity. This is a particular type of an encounter with the passport photograph. 

As I try to think of what else the passport photo does, I am reminded of my father’s wallet. In it, 

he always has a passport photograph of my mother. A photograph that is probably several 

decades old at this point. He always looks at it longingly. In that same flat photograph, my father 

seems to find different affective intensities. For him, the photograph conjures different 

memories, visions, and relationships to who is in the image. He is neither the photographer nor 

the photographed.  

Despite this doubled-ness, Cho reminds us that passport photos “call to mind the burden 

of identification photos to speak, to announce and respond to the question posed but not asked 

regarding the truth of one’s identity…to declare prima facie that one is who one claims to be” 

(Cho, 2009, p. 278). Passport photos circulate and linger within the economy of racialized, 

gendered, and marginalized lives. They serve primarily as objects to allay suspicion, to raise 

questions, to identify the questionable. Following the U.S. Government’s immigration ban in 

2017, the artist Sobia Ahmad developed “Small Identities” as a response to the xenophobic and 

islamophobic policies in the U.S. She collected passport photos from Muslim immigrants in the 

Richmond area and placed them on arabesque tiles. She learned soon that participants were 

 

 

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hesitant to submit their photos for fear of persecution. And for every participant who did not 

want to share their passport photo, she included a blank tile. How can one claim an identity on a 

two-inch square? How can one claim an identity if you are told not to smile, not to wear a hijab, 

not to show your teeth, to leave the walls bare, to conform?  

The Process 

In fall 2018, I followed my resonance with and curiosities about passport photographs. I 

followed it with “the kind of curiosity that gets one into 

methodological/ontological/epistemological/disciplinary trouble” (Loveless, 2019, p. 23). I was 

interested in seeing what would happen if we quietly challenged the civil contract of the passport 

photograph, to call into question its very purpose and to create something else out of it. In this 

pursuit, I was driven by Kumar’s (2000) question: “[W]hen dealing with the varied, and often 

invisible, complexities of immigrant lives, how might we struggle against the poor economy of 

the photographs taken by the state or the racist, dominant media?” (p. 41-42). I wanted to shift 

the encounter that immigrants and refugees often have with their passport photographs—

identification, surveillance, and suspicion—through its official use. 

 

 

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Figure 5 Untitled. Photograph: Vivek Vellanki 

 

Drawing on the ideas of arts-based research as a process of “thinking-making-doing,” I 

decided to create an engagement with passport photos that shifts its official purpose and also 

makes visible the resonances, contradictions, and desires that immigrants and refugees 

experience with this everyday object. I started by working with a small group of immigrants and 

asked them to share their passport photos with me. I scanned these images and reprinted the 

photographs at a much larger size—13X19 inches, leaving a 2-inch border on all sides of the 

image. I returned these resized images along with some basic art supplies—acrylic paints, 

sharpies, archival glue sticks, old magazines. I invited my collaborators to transform the 

photographs in any way that they wanted to. My prompt to them was: “What do you want the 

world to know about you?” As I expanded the project to a wider group of collaborators, I became 

aware of the challenges in asking migrants to share their passport photos with a stranger during 

times of heightened socio-political persecutions of migrants and refugees. Thinking about Sobia 

Ahmed’s work, I experimented with my process to allow for more people to participate. Instead 

of asking collaborators to share their passport photos with me before the art-making sessions, I 

brought a printer and scanner with me to the site, allowing individuals to bring their passport 

 

 

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photos instead of leaving it with me for the scanning and printing process. A few months in, the 

artist Qais Assali pointed out that my process was also reframing the bureaucracy. In printing 

and scanning on site, I was recreating and potentially recasting the experience of getting a 

passport photo made, applying for a visa, or engaging in any of the several other aspects of the 

public office.  

Figure 6 Scanning and Printing set up during one of the Passport Photo Project sessions. 

Photograph: Vivek Vellanki 

 

Over a period of nine months, I conducted several sessions across the cities of East 

Lansing, Michigan and Fort Wayne, Indiana. I invited people through social media and email 

listservs. I had no age/nationality restrictions. Any person who identified as an 

immigrant/refugee could bring their passport photo and participate. I conducted sessions in high 

schools, public libraries, cafes, and people’s basements. I provided some light refreshments and 

together, we created art while being in community and engaging in multigenerational 

conversations. Between September 2018 and May 2019, I collaborated with 50 migrants and 

refugees. I decided not to interview any of my collaborators or to ask them what the images 

“mean,” what they intended to convey. Instead of thinking on behalf of the images, offering, 

 

 

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what Loveless (2019) calls, “perspectival certainty” (p. 46) I wanted to think and feel with the art 

created by collaborators. This influenced my process of analysis which I describe next. 

The Analysis: Aesthetics, Stories, Community 

I embarked on a material, affective treatment of the work that is not about epistemic 

certainty but about relationality. If methodology is a lifestyle choice then how do these choices 

factor along the spectrum of data collection, analysis, and publishing? I knew that I did not want 

to analyze the images using the process of coding or other qualitative approaches. Instead, I 

wanted to think about ways of sharing this work that engaged the materiality of the art work 

created by my collaborators. I decided to curate an exhibition as a way to share the pieces created 

by my collaborators to the broader public. Driven initially by curiosity, I now decided to shift 

towards a careful curation. Loveless (2019) reminds us that the three words, careful, curate, 

curious, share the same root: to care. Warning, desire, and considered choice became crucial 

elements in the process of curation. The exhibition, titled Do You Have Anything to Declare? 

opened at the MSU Union Gallery in October 2019. 

I want to briefly discuss three elements that became important in the process of creation 

and curation through, what I call, the ASC framework – Aesthetics, Stories, Community. I was 

able to articulate ASC as a framework after completing the project and the exhibition, a 

framework that was preordained but one that became visible only in hindsight and one that still 

remains incomplete, partial, and only explains a portion of the work. However, and as I will 

describe below, I was attendant to and practicing various elements of this framework throughout 

the process. ASC doesn’t encompass/explain everything I did. However, it offers a way for me to 

think, feel, theorize, and practice the idea of methodology as a lifestyle choice. Below, I describe 

how these three elements became crucial aspects guiding various steps of the process from 

ideation to creation to curation. 

 

 

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Aesthetics 

Aesthetics are a central part of arts-based research. Within this space, Springgay (2004) 

writes, “The artworks are not objects, which need theory applied to them, nor are they 

illustrations of language. They are ways of knowing and being in their own right” (p. 15). I 

approached the project with a keen awareness of and attention to the role of aesthetics in offering 

a possible reengagement with passport photos which at once reveals its bureaucratic purposes 

and also brings to light the deeply personal and subjective relationships migrants have to these 

objects.  

In creating the work. Interested in reframing our experiences/stories around passport 

photos, I decided to resize them to 13X19 inches, making them much larger than their usual size. 

To see them in this size, I hoped, would create a different encounter with the image. My decision 

for this sizing also reflects the poster size that is commonly seen associated with messaging in 

airports, public offices, and other bureaucratic spaces. I provided my collaborators with acrylic 

paint, scissors, and magazines for collage. The magazines that I procured were quintessentially 

“U.S.” magazines – New Yorker, National Geographic, Good Living, etc. These magazines 

portray, at once, an idea of the U.S. to the rest of the world and also circulate ideas about the rest 

of the world within the U.S. (Lutz & Collins, 1993). While the resized image was 13X19 inches, 

my collaborators decided the size for their final product. I encouraged them to transform their 

passport photos in any way that they chose. I saw some of my collaborators cut the photographs, 

resize them, stitch them to make other orientations/formats. For example, one of my 

collaborators, Vanessa, decided to cut her resized passport photo and glued it together to recreate 

the landscape orientation reflected in the first page of a passport. Across the pieces that my 

collaborators created I was stuck by the variations in sizes, styles, and aesthetic choices. No two 

 

 

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pieces look similar and this was something that neither I and nor my collaborators had 

anticipated.   

In sharing the work. The aesthetics of the exhibition were shaped by the aesthetics 

emerging through the process of creating the work. I decided to bring out the contradiction 

between the bureaucracy/official role of passport photos and the lives of migrants through the 

overall aesthetics of the exhibition. Here, I will focus on two elements. First, instead of 

displaying the work on walls as is common with traditional gallery displays, I decided to use 

poster stands. My choice of poster stands—which are often used to share official information 

with travellers—was shaped by my own experience in airports, immigration offices, etc. This 

aesthetic decision was also inspired by Christian Boltanski’s work, in which he uses stands to 

shed light on the lives of people who were persecuted during the Holocaust. My use of the stands 

is an aesthetic treatment of the discord between the bureaucratic/dehumanizing treatment of 

migrants—signified by the stand—and at the same time the all too human interventions that each 

participant makes with their passport photos. The stands serve as a depiction of people standing 

in line—in airports, visa offices, at borders, in government offices etc and the cold, 

dehumanizing gaze of the bureaucracy.  

 

 

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Figure 7 Fabricating the stands to be used in the exhibition. Photograph: Vivek Vellanki 

 

Furthermore, I organized the work in the gallery to convey the choices described above. I 

structured the gallery space to replicate an airport line, creating narrow points of passage where 

only one or two visitors could pass through at a time. These spatial arrangements often forced 

visitors to wait in line, observe the person in front of them, to look around the space, or to engage 

others also standing in line. I also added frequently asked questions about passport photos posted 

on the U.S. Governmental websites onto the walls of the gallery. These aesthetic considerations, 

along with others, become central to my understanding and engagement with the works created 

by my collaborators. Through the use of these aesthetic elements, I sought to bring out the 

contradictions between the state’s perceptions and policies towards immigrants and their layered 

lives and experiences.  

 

 

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Figure 8 Installation view of Do you have anything to declare? Photograph: Charles Benoit 

 

Stories 

Ultimately, The Passport Photo Project is about stories, our stories of migration. In 

Thomas King’s (2005) critically acclaimed book The truth about stories, he writes “The truth 

about stories is that that's all we are” (p. 153). What are the stories we tell about passport photos? 

What stories do our photos reveal and hide? Returning to Azoulay’s (2015) idea of excess in 

photographs, I invited my collaborators to seek out a “different ethic. Tell a different story” with 

regards to their passport photos (King, 2005, p. 164). Pushing King’s idea, Loveless (2019) 

argues that stories are not simply about hearing or seeing, they are also about touch. In the 

passport photo project, my collaborators embark on telling stories that are material-semiotic 

entanglements—the cutting, pasting, and remixing of passport photos.  

These entanglements also invite viewers to participate/interact with the pieces at various 

levels—to be playful, to be tentative, to be with the stories that my collaborators are sharing. For 

example, one of my collaborators, Wanfei, decided to use sticky notes on top of her passport 

photo. These sticky notes had short phrases written on them. I assume that these phrases convey 

parts of her identity and life: “Chinese low-class, rational, friendly” etc. Visitors would often 

 

 

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physically move these sticky notes, peeling each layer to read what is written and eventually end 

up seeing Wanfei’s transformed photo. Wanfei’s creation is an example of a layered story that is 

told using different registers—the affective, the material, and the visual. I assume that each 

viewer walked away with a different experience while interacting with her piece.  

Figure 9 Wanfei's Passport Photo. Courtesy: Wanfei and Vivek Vellanki 

 

Furthermore, the individual pieces placed together in the exhibition also tell a collective 

story, a story that runs against and alongside other small and big stories we are told and tell each 

other about migration, migrants, and passport photos. I am interested in knowing what these 

stories do to/for me, my collaborators, and those who view our work. Perhaps they do nothing. 

And perhaps they do something. In both instances, it is difficult to pinpoint what it is they do. 

My goal is not to identify these shifts. Instead, I am interested in creating room for us to tell 

more stories—some that will contradict, some that will affirm, some that will question, some that 

will challenge, and some that will do things that cannot be named.  

Community 

My understandings of community are shaped by Pablo Helguera’s (2011) work on 

Socially Engaged Art practices (SEA). While all art invites social interaction, SEA, according to 

 

 

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Helguera, centers participation in the very fabrication of the work. Participation is not nominal or 

directed as is the case with most activities within museums. For example, asking people to fill 

out a note-card, tweeting about an exhibition, taking a selfie in front of a particular artwork, etc. 

My engagement with the migrant community in the Greater Lansing area took the form of 

“creative participation,” wherein I provided the broad parameters of the art-work and let my 

collaborators create their individual pieces.  

In creating the work. Throughout this process, I paid attention to several aspects of 

community. First, I focussed on creating space for exchange and dialogue with my collaborators 

i.e. I often started any art-making session with some community-building activities, provided 

light refreshments, played music that was curated by my collaborators, and created a space for 

dialogue and conversation. I saw this as particularly important because spaces for migrant 

communities to be in conversation often don’t exist within the broader publics. This was an 

opportunity to dialogue and to share in each other’s experiences. I conducted sessions in schools, 

public libraries, cafes, universities, and in people’s homes (Image 5).  

In each instance, it was a multi-generational group, coming together to create work. Here, 

my goal was not to make myself disappear. Instead, I used my own curiosity about passport 

photos as a way to engage my collaborators in similar departures, asking them to consider their 

own curiosities, stories, and lives about passport photos. This project is a collective construction 

of knowledge about the migrant experience, refracted through the object of the passport photo, 

bringing into question the historic role of passport photos as well as the contemporary discourses 

around migrant lives.  

 

 

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Figure 10 One of the Passport Photo Project sessions held in a collaborators basement. 

Photograph: Vivek Vellanki 

 

In sharing the work. The aesthetics of the exhibition, as I discussed earlier, were 

determined by our collective stories and experiences of migration. As I prepared to share this 

work with the broader community, I focussed on two important questions—what experience do 

we want community members to have? How do we want them to experience the work? These 

questions were a huge factor in how the exhibition was curated and structured.  

The recreation of the line within the gallery became an important aspect of viewing the 

exhibition. During tours with classes and community groups, people were often held up where I 

had deliberately created bottlenecks. The narrow spaces forced viewers to wait for the people 

ahead of them to move. Sometimes the wait was short and in other instances it was much longer. 

The experience was akin to waiting in an immigration line. In the process of waiting, one 

couldn’t do much else but look around, see the surroundings, engage with other pieces, or the 

people around them.  

I also created space for directed participation with the visitors. I included a notecard at 

the end of the exhibit where I invited visitors to contemplate the question “Do you have anything 

to declare?” The exhibition also created a conversation within the broader community around 

 

 

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issues of migration through news articles, conversations spurred by visitors, students visiting the 

exhibition as part of their course, and other engagements.  

Figure 11 Select Responses from Visitors to the Exhibition 

 

 

I am writing this at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this moment, our lifestyles 

Implications for the Field and Future Research 

have been radically altered by the pandemic. Life as we know it has been interrupted and at the 

same time, it has made bare the fundamental problems with the society we have collectively 

built. And now, I do nearly the same thing all day, every day. What does methodology as a 

lifestyle choice mean under these circumstances? I want to make it abundantly clear that 

methodology as a lifestyle choice is not an argument for an anything-goes approach to research. 

On the contrary, it brings to light ethical, moral, affective, biographical, and material concerns to 

the research process. I might be drawn to passport photos but is that a good enough reason for 

me to research them? Why am I drawn to these objects? What is my own relationship to these 

objects and the social spheres that are constructed around them? What does this research process 

entail, for me as a researcher and for anybody I ask to participate? Is research really the 

intervention needed here?  

 

These are some initial questions that come to mind. The history of the social sciences, 

unfortunately, highlights how researchers have often followed their own desires and pursuit for 

knowledge at the cost of the lives and lifeworld’s of communities: “Social science hunts for new 

 

 

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objects of study, and its favored reaping grounds are Native, urban, poor, and Othered 

communities” (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 813). The academy is built on ideas of invasion and 

mining of communities, species, land, artifacts, etc (Smith, 2012). We/they justified our deeply 

dehumanizing and settler-colonial practices using the language of science, determinacy, 

objectivity, and knowledge. If I see methodology as a lifestyle choice, then refusal is an integral 

part of that process for me. Especially, in thinking about how “Indigenous and Native 

researchers, researchers of color, and/or queer researchers in academe are frequently pressured to 

mine their families, communities, and personal stories to become recast as academic data” (Tuck 

& Yang, 2014, p. 813). In following our desires and curiosities, we might end up doing more 

harm to ourselves, to others, and to various communities. How do we un/learn what is not to be 

touched or seen or heard? How do we un/learn to question our desires and curiosities? And 

perhaps, most importantly, are there other ways to quell our desires and curiosities beyond the 

act of doing research?  

 

Unfortunately, there is no prescribed, linear way to answer these questions. To answer 

these questions with honesty, courage, and vulnerability, to the best of our abilities, requires an 

unmooring from disciplinary traditions. We have to give up already existing disciplinary 

frameworks, that at this point, offer a formulaic response to ethical questions. For example, in 

recent years, positionality statements have turned from aspects that challenged the objectivist 

gaze of the academy to short-paragraphs that are an afterthought, consumed by the very academy 

it sought to challenge. It has turned into a listicle, a justification for doing XYZ work because I 

am ABC. I am guilty of this myself.  

 

The idea of methodology as a lifestyle choice invites us to be tentative, uncertain, and to 

acknowledge the limits of our knowing. And at the same time, it propels us to turn inward, to ask 

 

 

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ourselves questions about why we are drawn to do the work that we are doing. In detaching 

ourselves from disciplinary traditions, we are propelled to leave given frameworks for justifying 

research—gaps in literature, problem statements, vulnerable populations, understudied groups, 

etc. These frameworks, often times, also come with preestablished rationales for doing research 

(Patel, 2014). Tuck and Yang’s (2014) work asks us to challenge these rationales and to also ask 

other questions, of ourselves and of the institutions within which we operate and do this work.  

 

In my current scholarly and artistic work, I turned to art, literature, and music, as an 

impetus for theoretical, methodological, and ethical questions. My fascination with photography 

initially led me to photovoice but following my own desires and curiosities led me to the works 

of artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Pushpamala, Teju Cole, Sohrab Hura, Carolyn Drake, Secola, 

and others. Here too, I found no readymade justifications, I often found more questions. And 

these questions propelled me to carve out and create a practice, which definitely builds on the 

works of some of the authors and artists I note above, but is also markedly connected to my life 

experiences, desires, and curiosities. I am able to name this as the ASC Framework, a naming 

that happened only in hindsight, a naming that came after the thinking-making-doing, and not 

before it.  

 

I imagine that methodology as a lifestyle choice will mean different things for all of us, 

and it should, that is the point. It is less of a methodology traditionally understood as a quasi-

scientific justification and more a way of life, of being, of relationality, of ethics, of justice. It is 

an uncoupling from the techno-scientific justifications that have led us here in the first place, the 

foundation on which the settler-colonial practices of the academy are built (Patel, 2014). And 

yet, methodology as a lifestyle choice is not a promised land. Perhaps, at its best, it is an inner 

angle, a small movement which has the possibility of opening up other avenues, ways of being, 

 

 

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thinking and doing. I’d like to end here, not with my own assertion, but with the explication of 

the metaphor of an inner angle, by Tuck and Yang (2018): 

“For readers who have ever held a young one on their laps or on a hip, consider the weight of the 

baby, how the weight and pressure grows more intense with passing time. Then, consider the 

physical sensation of moving that young one to the other hip, or off the lap, or to another knee. 

New vantage points, new movements, new somatic possibilities are made through that small 

shift. This is the simple idea at the center of the metaphor of an inner angle” (p. 3).

 

 

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CHAPTER 4 Do You Have Anything to Declare? 

Do you have anything to declare? is an exhibition based on The Passport Photo Project, 

an arts-based exploration of the experiences, desires, and imaginations of immigrants, 

international students, and refugees living in the mid-western U.S. Through this work and the 

exhibition, I highlight the complex subjectivities embodied by immigrants and refugees. The 

Passport Photo Project challenges contemporary visual narratives of migration by collaborating 

with immigrants and refugees to transform passport photos from objects of state bureaucracy into 

portraits that are seeping with desires, anxieties, explorations, and play. In October 2019, I held a 

solo-exhibition, Do you have anything to declare? at the MSU Union Gallery. All photographs in 

this chapter are courtesy Charles Benoit, unless indicated otherwise.  

 

Figure 12 Front and Back of the Invite for the Exhibition, Do you have anything to declare? 
Design: Lindsey Hendges  

 

 

 

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Figure 13 View of the Exhibition from Outside the Gallery 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 14 Artist Statement for the Exhibition (left) and Installation View (right) 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 15 Drape with Projections Forming the Entrance to the Exhibition 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 16 Installation View of Do you have anything to declare?  

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 17 Installation View of Do you have anything to declare? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 18 Installation View of Do you have anything to declare? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 19 Visitors Interacting With the Artworks. Photograph: Vivek Vellanki 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 20 Visitors Filling out Notecards at the Exhibition. Photograph: Vivek Vellanki 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER 5 Notes From the City 

The final chapter is constructed as a photobook titled, Notes from the City. Please access 

the supplemental materials section to view the photobook.  

 

 

 

 

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