The impossible capture: Towards a leaping methodology

Abstract

ABSTRACTI offer Klein's Leap into the void as an entrée into exploring the complexities of qualitative research in education. In exposing the ways in which performance photography/documentation performs on the boundaries of representation, Klein helps us to think about representation and dissemination differently. Through this article I will explore what a leaping methodology in educational research would look like and what it could do, and will consider Klein's strategy of the leaping document as both a method that problematizes reductionist understandings of presence, as well as a method that creates a self-reflexive representation that offers a different way of “retrieving” what can be “known.” By performing this tension through photomontage—moreover, through the dissemination and consequent mutation of its form—Klein's hoax can offer educational researchers a method of exposing the materiality of conventional research categories that too often cover up contradictions and paradoxes.