The Visual Turn in the History of Education: Four Comments for a Historiographical Discussion

Abstract

The visual turn has been received as a welcome renewal in historiography, but its effects need to be conceptualized further. In the chapter, I propose four lines of arguments about how the visual is being received in the history of education. First, I comment on the predominance of photography and of photographic imagination, which takes for granted the truth claims of pictures and overlooks the problematic quality of any visual representation and its truth claims. Second, I observe a blind spot in relation to the historicizing of the visual and its technologies. Pictures, whether photographs, paintings, or films, are taken as neutral conveyors of a historical quality that lies in the referent. Third, the visual turn and the studies that are emerging out of it suggest the importance of analyzing the ways in which schooling was constituted as a visual space, and was turned into a spectacle worth seeing. Finally, I discuss some of the paradoxes that lie in the relationships of images and affects, and how they represent challenges to the work of historians.KeywordsVisual SpaceTruth ClaimVisual TechnologyHistorical QualityVisual CultureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.