Telling Stories, Forging Links, and Researching Lives

Abstract

This chapter maps the issues and tensions, theoretical and methodological, to which this book responds. The author describes her own experiences as a visual art pedagogue in a notoriously violent and impoverished South Bronx Junior High School. Through this ethnographic tale, she begins to contextualise the need for educational research in the area of youth identities and visual material culture (VMC). In particular, Eglinton underlines a disconnection between youth cultural experiences, theory, pedagogy, and empirical studies that examine young people’s use of VMC. Drawing on Hall’s (The local and the global: globalization and ethnicity. In McClintock A, Mufti A, Shohat E (eds) Dangerous liaisons: gender, nation, and post-colonial perspectives. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp 173–187, 1997a) global postmodern, and place or locality as a key conceptual tool, the author argues for a more relational understanding of youth engagement with VMC: one involving youth experiences, VMC, and the social and physical geographies young people live with/in and through. In the second part of this chapter, the focus turns to methodology: the author refers to ‘new’ ethnographies (e.g. in Lather PA, Postmodernism, post-structuralism and post (critical) ethnography: of ruins, aporias and angels. In Atkinson P, Coffey A, Delamont S, Lofland J, Lofland L (eds) Handbook of ethnography. Sage, London, pp 477–492, 2001) and describes the ‘multi-sited’ (Marcus G, Ethnography through thick and thin. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998), participatory, visual-based ethnography used in this study; particular attention is paid to visual-based methods as well as to issues around authority and representation. The author concludes with the aims and outline of the book.