Visual Culture, Image Education, and Post-Digital Innovation: Intersections and Future directions

The development of information technologies, the widespread use of Internet content have led to a situation where the skills of working with visual materials are becoming more popular and make a necessary component of education in the XXI century. The would-be teacher, operating with visual images, must form the younger generation’s skills to evaluate critically, interpret and summarize information, i.e. must have a high level of visual and information culture. This problem is in focus for the preparation of wouldbe mathematics and computer science teachers, because their activities are designed to form students’ information picture of the world, scientifically competently and quickly to convey basic ideas and form fundamental ideas about the world and its laws under conditions of the intensification of the educational process. The nature of the phenomenon of “visual and information culture” is dualistic. It is a synthesis of two phenomena – visual culture and information culture. Analysis of the essence of the concepts “visual culture” and “information culture” allowed revealing the essence of the phenomenon “visual and information culture of would-be mathematics and computer science teachers”. The visual and information culture of would-be mathematics and computer science teachers is the integrative quality of personality, which combines values, aspirations for development in the field of visualization and informatization of education; computer and mathematical, psychological and pedagogical, technological knowledge; ability to perceive, analyze, compare, interpret, produce with the use of information technology, structure, integrate, evaluate visually presented educational material; ability to analyze, predict and reflect on their own professional activities in the visualization of educational material using computer visualization means, which provides professional self-development and self-improvement. So, it should include various components, among which we distinguish the following: professional-motivational, cognitive, operational-activity, and reflexive. The content of each of these components and the mechanism of their formation is developed both individually and in teams. The cognitive component is characterized by developed visual thinking, which we see in the ability to transform various problem situations in the structure of new knowledge, in the creation of cognitive structures in which information is presented by creating models, schemes and more. The operational component is also characterized by a communicative aspect: the ability to transmit educational information by visual means, on the one hand, and the ability to perceive and understand educational information presented visually, on the other. The components are characterized in full and quite widely, which makes it difficult to determine the levels of their formation. This determines the prospects for further exploration, which is to find criteria for determining the levels of formation of visual and information culture of pre-service mathematics and computer science teachers.

Book Review| January 01 2022 Review: A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico, by K. Mitchell Snow K. Mitchell Snow, A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020. 346 pages. Hardcover $90.00. Lesley A. Wolff Lesley A. Wolff Texas Tech University, Lubbock Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2022) 4 (1): 152–154. https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2022.4.1.152 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Lesley A. Wolff; Review: A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico, by K. Mitchell Snow. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1 January 2022; 4 (1): 152–154. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2022.4.1.152 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture Search There is a timeliness to the release of K. Mitchell Snow’s A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico in September 2020, a moment when the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill. We were suddenly confronted with empty roadways, empty classrooms, and the constant hum of the computer fan running in overdrive to keep us virtually connected through a litany of corporate collaborative platforms: Zoom, Skype, Yammer, Slack, Canvas, Blackboard. At the same time, protestors and activists took to the streets across the hemisphere, from Chile to Mexico to the United States, disrupting the stillness to demand civic, social, and racial justice. Against this backdrop of capitalism and modernity stressed to their very limit and a collective longing for connection, Snow’s book brings the vitality of movement and the promise of collaboration into relief, not only in the context of Mexico, but also as... You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America by Peter John Brownlee David Henkin (bio) Keywords Vision, Perception, Visual culture The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America. By Peter John Brownlee. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 264. Cloth, $45.00.) Despite the success of environmental and cultural historians in reconstructing the broader sensorium of the nineteenth century, eyesight remains a particular preoccupation in the study of urban life in the early [End Page 156] American republic. Visual culture, the focus of much interdisciplinary scholarship since the 1990s, takes center stage in two important recent contributions to the field, Justin Clark's City of Second Sight: Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 2018) and Amy Lippert's Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Oxford, UK, 2018), books whose quite different interests in the act of looking confirm the enduring link between cities and sight. Peter Brownlee's striking new book, The Commerce of Vision, joins this chorus line. Although various biases and predispositions might explain the focus on vision in historical scholarship more generally (the sensory orientations of modern Westerners, the disproportionate dependence of historians on visible source material, and the expanding purview of the discipline of art history), studies of nineteenth-century U.S. cities have turned toward the visual out of a more specific recognition that these urban environments were places where seeing mattered especially. Influenced by Georg Simmel's and Walter Benjamin's portraits of nineteenth-century (European) cities as sites of fleeting gazes, impersonal relations, and capitalist display, where eyes worked harder than ears, histories of urban culture in the United States stress such themes as illumination, observation, surveillance, monumental projection, and, above all, spectacular consumption. Brownlee's contribution adds a neglected component to this picture. To fully grasp the urban spectacle, he proposes, we need to examine urban spectacles. Eyes were the targets of an intensifying barrage of advertising, exhibition, instruction, and entertainment, Brownlee observes, and they drew rising concern for their health and fitness. Introduced in the medieval period, corrective spectacles grew more common over the first half of the century in the United States, "valued for … what they communicated about the status" of their wearers (72). Moving smoothly from ophthalmological discourse to the optical trade, the first part of The Commerce of Vision narrates this development well, highlighting the role of Philadelphia opticians, advertisers, artists, and cultural critics in the increasing acceptance of eyewear and the process by which "correct vision became a central component of bourgeois selfhood in a market system that placed new demands on the eyes of its participants" (72). Those new demands were specifically textual, however, which is part of what distinguishes Brownlee's book from many other exemplars of the visual turn in urban history. Whereas the category of visual culture in [End Page 157] Clark's Boston serves to distinguish images and sights from texts, and whereas visual culture in Lippert's San Francisco contrasts photographs and lithographs with live encounters, the visual landscape that interests Brownlee consists almost entirely of printed words. Big words, tiny words, distant words, occluded words—these were the sights that urban eyes needed help perceiving. Cultivating correct vision entailed learning how to read the texts distributed and displayed, often chaotically, in urban space. The second part of the book pivots to that chaos, showing how broadsides and posters adopted and adapted fatter typefaces in order to be visible at a distance, while embracing patterns of layout and composition to meet the shifting vantage points of mobile observers (97). The sturdier signboards covering building facades in Philadelphia and New York pursued similar strategies, producing in the process "a syntax premised on distraction" (121). The designers and producers of commercial signage were thus in the same business as the opticians, trying to adjust for the ocular challenges of modern city living and train a new generation of urban consumers in proper vision. But the proliferation of their works, of course, reinforced the disjunction of the cityscape and added to the visual obstacle course of urban living. The final section of the book turns...

The purpose of this study is to identify the potential of visual culture in contemporary studies of ethnocultural identity. The author examines in detail visual images, which he considers not only as ways of representation of ethnocultural identity, but also as important mechanisms of its construction. At the same time, the potential of the so-called images of identity becomes especially important due to the fact that visual images play an increasingly important role in the modern globalized world. Understanding and using their potential becomes a key aspect in the study of ethnocultural identity today, when visual culture is a powerful tool for understanding how images reflect sociocultural realities and how they interact with a wide range of social and cultural processes, and the study of ethnocultural identity becomes especially relevant in the light of globalization and digitalization of modern society. The author uses visual studies as the main research methodology, where the unit of research is the image as a carrier of meanings and an active participant of sociocultural processes. The main conclusions of this study are the following: visual culture is a dynamic space where visual practices and images not only reflect, but also actively shape ethnocultural identity, contributing to the critical rethinking of cultural interactions. Images of ethnocultural identity may include not only signs and symbols that are decipherable when perceived by a representative of a particular ethnocultural group, but also meanings that have a special potential hidden in visual images. Images of ethnocultural identity create a unique visual impression that reflects and shapes the values and traditions of a certain ethnocultural group. The study of the role of the visual in the context of identity allows us to conclude that visual images play a key role in its research to date.

American culture in the twenty-first century is conceptually fraught with problems: new communications and media technologies make the visual imagery of American culture instantaneously accessible globally; the consumption of American goods and imagery is frequently a metonym for wealth, status, and power; and yet, just as often, American culture is seen as a polluting and contaminating force that threatens the integrity and viability of other cultures (see Figure 1). Even American scholars have flattened and oversimplified the idea of American culture as something fixed and stable. But American cultural identity is neither singular nor unitary; rather it is a constantly mutating social construct and the result of multiple of transcultural connections, transactions, negotiations, and exchanges. And its borders are permeable and porous; its mutating identity is elastic and slippery. This article considers the problems presented by a singular unitary construct of American visual culture specifically in today's world of exponentially expanding production and consumption of digitally produced visual images, of transactual global visual communications and transcultural identities. It argues for a reframing of the intellectual platforms of American (visual) culture studies in light of the fact that the primary sites of American transcultural transactions are increasingly visual. Moreover, the article explores how the history of American art and visual culture has already reframed its scholarly discourse to embrace a more relativist and complex conceptualization of American visual culture as a network of imbricated transcultural transactions. Finally, it proposes a new scholarly and pedagogical platform upon which future American (visual) culture studies might be built. Reframing American Visual Culture for the Twenty-First Century Many scholars argue today that the idea of a fixed or unitary consideration of culture(s) needs rethinking owing to the global transactions facilitated by communications technologies in the twenty-first century. Nicholas Mirzoeff, for example, argues that culture is less a fixed entity than a hybrid of networks in which the process of cultural exchange is perpetually (re)negotiated among cultures. Mirzoeff approvingly cites Fernando Ortiz who claimed that in any transaction among cultures, weak or strong, the cultures are changed and that accordingly all culture is (41). Additionally, the change is constant: transculture is a perpetual process of deculturation and reculturation of both the weak and strong (41). Thus, meaning in culture is a result of constant ongoing (re)negotiation of cultural identity as cultures reimagine and regenerate themselves. Cultures continually possess, alter and assimilate aspects of other cultures into their own. Mirzoeff thus concludes that all transculture is plural because transculture has no beginning or end and is always in transformation (43). Within this conceptual framework cultural meaning is located less in a search for a singular authenticity in culture than in transactions among (trans)cultures. Cultural meaning (transcultural narrative) cannot be comprehended either from a singular authoritative viewpoint or as a static entity; it can only be comprehended as moving and mutating, and it can only be observed in fragments from a transverse or oblique perspective and with an implicated eye. Within today's hybrid, global, visual communications networks, the construction of visual cultural identity is not monolithic. Rather, it is a constantly morphing multiplicity of transcultural transactions. Just as mechanical technology fundamentally transformed communication in the nineteenth century, digital technology is proving to be equally transformative in the twenty-first century. Digitally produced visual images have become America's most pervasive and widely consumed good. Those with access to digital technologies increasingly read, think, and communicate visually. …

This chapter argues that just as images and texts are treated expansively in the context of the visual culture of late medieval religious devotion, and are understood to have multivalent meanings and significances, so should musical notation. Sound and music have lately been integrated into the study of visual culture, as part of an approach to reception that seeks to analyse the multisensory nature of the experience of medieval devotional objects and images. Despite this greater sensitivity to sound, and to the important links between the visual and the aural in medieval religious experience, music is sometimes assumed by scholars trained in the analysis of visual and material culture to enjoy a concrete reality only when the music is sung. Thus, musical notation within visual images is either considered as mere ‘decoration’, and as an evocation of the general idea of ‘music’, or as a record of or a prescription for performance. This chapter will suggest that notation can do similar devotional work to that performed by images and texts, and should be considered more readily as part of the study of the visual culture of late medieval devotion.

How to think about what it means to look and see: a guide for navigating the complexities of visual culture. The visual surrounds us, some of it invited, most of it not. In this visual environment, everything we see—color, the moon, a skyscraper, a stop sign, a political poster, rising sea levels, a photograph of Kim Kardashian West—somehow becomes legible, normalized, accessible. How does this happen? How do we live and move in our visual environments? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a guide for navigating the complexities of visual culture, outlining strategies for thinking about what it means to look and see—and what is at stake in doing so. Visual culture has always been inscribed by the dominant and by domination. This book suggests how we might weaponize the visual for positive, unifying change. Drawing on both historical and contemporary examples—from Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party and Beyoncé and Jay-Z at the Louvre to the first images of a black hole—Alexis Boylan considers how we engage with and are manipulated by what we see. She begins with what: what is visual culture, and what questions, ideas, and quandaries animate our approach to the visual? She continues with where: where are we allowed to see it, and where do we stand when we look? Then, who: whose bodies have been present or absent from visual culture, and who is allowed to see it? And, finally, when: is the visual detached from time? When do we see what we need to see?

Venus rising, Furies raging: bodies redressed in contemporary visual art

Filling in the Picture: Visual Culture George H. Roeder Jr. (bio) Distinctions between history and art blur in the work of Fred Wilson, who rearranges museum collections to bring together items that convention normally separates. In his installation Mining the Museum (1992) at the Maryland Historical Society, he intermingled slave shackles, manufactured in Baltimore, with fine silver vessels made during the same time period for well-to-do Baltimoreans. Wilson’s display reminded viewers that shackles visually identified the status of wearers as well as restraining them; silver vessels gave visual evidence of their owners’ prominence. Bringing the shackles and silver vessels together took, in addition to Wilson’s artistic vision, years of collective struggle to change a discriminatory racial order that sustained, and perhaps in some small measure was sustained by, the practice of keeping these objects apart. Wilson, who in performances has smashed ornamental pieces that caricatured blacks, does not revere all visual remnants of the past. He does take them seriously. Increasingly in the twenty-five years since the inaugural issue of Reviews in American History, historians also have taken seriously American visual culture. Visual culture is what is seen. In her biography of Picasso, Gertrude Stein observes that what changes over time is what is seen and what is seen results from how everybody’s doing everything. What is seen depends on what there is to see and how we look at it. Historians of American visual culture have studied photographs, films, and videos; advertisements and other commercially produced visual materials; television and other electronic imagery; paintings, sculptures, and other works of visual art; illustrated magazines, comics and editorial cartoons; the visual appearance of buildings, cities, and the worked landscape; material objects that Americans have designed, manufactured or acquired; the human body as clothed, shaped, adorned, and depicted; and changes in modes of perception, including new ways of seeing made possible by innovations that changed the viewer’s vantage point or otherwise removed constraints. The 1982 tenth anniversary edition of Reviews (a historiographical survey like this twenty-fifth anniversary edition) had no essay on any of the two dozen topics enumerated in the previous sentence. Only one contributor, Michael Kammen, discussed at any length specific visual images. 1 Why? [End Page 275] Perhaps what Neil Harris wrote of intellectual historians in 1979 can be generalized to describe the relation most American historians had to visual phenomena during Reviews’s first decade. Harris observed that historians avoided study of topics such as the late-nineteenth-century iconographical revolution brought on by the halftone engraving process because they considered pictures intellectually suspect, lacked training for dealing with visual images and processes involved in their creation, and considered most images commercially tainted or aesthetic products that belonged in the specialized realm of art history. 2 However, books published in the tenth anniversary year indicated that scholars were building on the pioneering studies of American visual culture by dozens of scholars including Harris, Kammen, Leo Marx, John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Linda Nochlin, William H. Goetzmann, Thomas Schlereth, and Barbara Novak. 1982 publications included Daniel J. Czitrom’s Media and the American Mind From Morse to McLuhan, Michael Lesy’s Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life, 1860–1945, Karal Ann Marling’s Wall to Wall America: A Cultural History of Post Office Murals in the Great Depression, John Stilgoe’s Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845, and Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. 3 Much more was to come. In 1982 a typical age at which aspirants completed a doctorate in history was the mid-thirties. They were teenagers in the early 1960s, when visual evidence played a crucial role in the Cuban missile crisis, and networks doubled the length of their evening news broadcasts, partly to accommodate dramatic Civil Rights footage. Most submitted all consciousness to TV from November 22 to November 25, 1963, and attended college and graduate school amidst intense public attention to Vietnam and then Watergate. Some who had these experiences, along with older colleagues who had observed the mobilization of the visual environment during the Depression and World War II, or who simply became infatuated with...

The paper proposes a theoretical framework to understand the emergency of the post-truth era in the specific realm of Internet visual culture, and analyses the aesthetic and technological conditions that allow a new form of post-truth to emerge. The paper argues that Internet post-truth could be addressed as the jeu de la vérité (game of truth) emerging from the transformation of the Panopticon – the form of visual governamentality of modernity – into the POV-opticon. The POV-opticon is a regime of visibility outlined by the explosion of POV (Point of view) technologies of vision – mobile phones, VR and AR technologies – which are transforming POV from a cinematic aesthetic and technical format into one of the most controversial political-aesthetic battlefields of our time. The capability of cinematic POV to produce the seamless overlapping between body and technology is re-invented in relation to new technological devices that re-defines human and machinic agency within new regimes of visibility and new games of truth. The paper tries to understand the POV-opticon by looking at the development of a new type of selfie aesthetic and of a new imagery coming out of the ongoing machinization of the face operated by facial recognition technologies – what I’ve tried to define elsewhere as the Algorithmic Facial Image (AFI). Especially by defining POV-opticon and AFI, the paper expands the notion of regime of visibility proposed by Dutch art critic Camel van Winkel, and relates it to the notion of games of truth elaborated by Michel Foucault. If, according to Winkel, the regime of visibility is more about the drive to make visible rather than the visible itself, the drive presents a peculiar relation with truthfulness which seems to fit well with the games of truth generated by the POV-opticon. Games of truth is Foucault’s attempt to rethinking the concept of regime of truth defining the Panopticon, in relation to distributed forms of governamentality and emerging forms of subjectivity. The paper argues that POV-opticon provides the technological strata for explaining post-truth as the hermeneutical reality emerging from the proliferation of POV games of truth. POV games of truth are assembled into new POV micro-regime of truth algorithmically generated by the extraction of data from the subject and by the creation of a POV data double that works as the algorithmic answer to the drive to visibility and offers a solution to the ambiguities of the games of truth.

Influenced by culture studies and image theories, visual culture (or visual culture studies) emerges in the 1990s. There are three characteristics in visual culture: cross disciplines, postmodernism basis, and daily-life concern. ”Visuality” is one of key words coined by visual culture. The concept invites power and discourse into the traditional visual discussion, entering into a critical dimension and societal perspective. In the development of visual culture, theory of sociology does not play a positive role, though it is often mentioned. Chris Jenks conceives sociology doest not involve profoundly in the visual and modernity, comparing with other issues. However, it is a misunderstanding. Exploring social issues through visual images is called ”visual sociology.” Current Sociology (1986) put that ”visual sociology” is about as old as sociology itself.” Moreover, the fundamental position of ”observation” in social research method is closely connected to visual analysis. The problematic of observation therefore is perhaps the meeting point of visual culture studies and visual sociology. This paper will critically examine ”stratum of seeing” in social observation and try to find out the possible ”visual encounter” between the two fields.

Indonesia's geographical location in the growth zone of three plates namely Eurasia, Indo-Australia and Pacifica or commonly known as ring of fire, causes Indonesia to have many active volcanoes. The study intends to determine the design of illustrations in the encyclopedia of volcanoes as an alternative learning media for for inspiring the students. To collect detailed actual information that describes the symptoms of nature as well as the situation of social symptom conditions then this research is carried out with descriptive qualitative and quantitative research methods. This study uses illustration theory and visual culture as the main reference literature. Visual culture is an interdisciplinary field with visual concepts as the basis for the study of knowledge and understanding. One part of visual culture that has a very important role in this research is illustration. Illustration design is conveyed through drawings, illustrations, or photos about disaster situations and conditions that are equipped with narratives though effective language. It is expected that by the illustrations through visual images and combined with the narrative the interest of students, especially children can be more aroused so that the information presented can be more quickly captured and understood.With the availability of the book Encyclopedia of Mount Erupting for elementary school students, it is expected that knowledge about the erupting mountain can be conveyed interestingly so that children can have better understanding of the causes and how to deal with the disaster of erupting mountains. Keywords:Encyclopedia, Illustration, Book, Mountain Eruption, Visual Culture.

Introduction In a recent radio address from the Oval Office, President Clinton (1995) informed the nation that out of moral obligation, he was going direct the Food and Drug Administration to propose stiff restrictions on the advertising, marketing, and sales of cigarettes Invoking a 14-month study by the FDA, his message was aimed at the way in which cigarettes are advertised manipulative visual images-seducing young people smoke in complete disregard for their health (Clinton, p. 1). Clinton's declaration testifies the importance of art education at a time in history when visual culture dominates the way in which values, attitudes and beliefs about the body's health and welfare are disseminated. Visual culture is all inclusive and is appropriate content for art education in a cultural democracy. It represents that have been traditionally excluded from the of great works, images produced for film or television, for example, are now capable of receiving the same careful consideration that was once lavished upon works that made up the canon (Bryson, Holly, & Moxey, 1994, p. xvi). Today, technology has progressed the point that a vast quantity of images and text are transmitted via the Internet, CD ROM, the World Wide Web, and other electronic delivery systems. The result: visual culture has increased exponentially. In the Age of AIDS, Ebola, and other diseases, mass media images of the body deluge the late 20th century post-industrial landscape. The Age of these diseases ironically parallels the Age of Information. Visually provocative, they instill fear and confusion on the hand, and the desire for glamour and survival on the other. The White House address clearly indicates the impact of visual culture on the human body and the body politic, what Mitchell (1994) refers as the pictorial turn (p. 9). The President responded with evangelical zeal the smoking crisis among young children. By censuring the corporate tobacco producers as evil-doers and sympathizing with young consumers as sacrificial lambs, he polarized the discourse on health. What the radio message ignores, however, are educational strategies for understanding the implications of health-related images. Art educators can contribute a curriculum reform that includes visual culture and its effect upon students' physical, emotional, and social well-being. Such programs would value students' ability interpret the ideological content of visual images that affect the health of both their human and cultural bodies (Mitchell, p. 16). Fear of disease invading the body, marginalization of those who are afflicted, the search for cures, taking political action, and terminality and deathrepresent some of the conditions from which visual metaphors about illness and health originate. What are the aesthetic assumptions that inform the production of visual metaphors regarding illness and health? How have the visual arts contributed historically the fear of illness and prejudice toward those who are afflicted? What impact can art education theory and practice have on health consciousness today? These and other questions will be the focus of this paper, the purpose of which will not be suggest the abolition of health stereotypes, but influence art educational practices that will make school children aware of the inherent patterns in visual images that represent illness and health. Illness Metaphors and Stereotypes Sontag (1978) dissuades the use of metaphors because they mystify illness; they usurp the power of the afflicted deal effectively with their affliction. Her first-hand experience with cancer convinced her that nothing is more punitive than give a disease a meaning-that meaning being invariably a moralistic one (p. 58). Ironically, illness and disease metaphors are semiotically contagious through a pathogenic process of signification (Feldman, 1990, p. …

The centrality of the eye and visual ability in the life of individuals and society has spawneda form of culture that is called as visual culture. Visual culture studies are a burgeoningarea of study that emphasizes the complex interrelationship between visual image, cultureand spectators of visual image. On the other hand, communication practices that utilizevisual messages as means of interaction are also increasingly prevalent as this is driven bythe development of visual and communication technology which allows peoples to producetheir own visual image as messages to communicate them. This article tries to discuss theposition of visual culture studies within the communication science and the researchmethods that can be used in the communication science to examine visual image, culture,and spectatorships.Keywords: Visual culture, Visual culture studies, Visual communication,Communication science, Visual methodologies.

Teaching and research are an academic's two main responsibilities. The performance of these two roles (teacher and researcher) can be clearly separated or noticeably interwoven in a continuous reflective process that shares and interchanges positionalities and references. Research projects, in the context of the quality research group ESBRINA — contemporary subjectivities and learning environments (2009SGR 0503) — are usually started by making explicit the group's personal viewpoints regarding the topic they are scrutinising. As a result, different autobiographical accounts have been developed which provide complex and in-depth explanations of the process of constructing the research topics and relationships that are delved into. This article starts by offering a context for the research group's epistemological frame and argues for the need to conduct autobiographical accounts as a research strategy. This approach is illustrated by looking into the narratives recently written for two research, development and innovation projects. The first one was aimed at understanding how novice teachers are learning to become teachers under post-Fordist working conditions, and the second endeavoured to explore how teenagers are learning from multiple literacies inside and outside of school. The article concludes by pointing out the European dimension of the research and the lessons learnt regarding the dilemmas on writing autobiographical accounts as part of a research process. ( http://www.cecace.org/ ), coordinator of Innovative University Teaching Group — Indaga-t ( http://fint.doe.d5.ub.es/indagat-web/ ), and a member of REUNI+D — University Network for Educational Research and Innovation (EDU2010-12194-E) ( http://reunid.eu ). He has extensive experience in promoting research policy at an institutional level, advising research programmes and projects, and assessing and managing research projects. He co-directs the book series ‘Repensar la educatión [Rethinking education]’ and directs the book series ‘Intersecciones [Intersections]’ both published by Octaedro. He has published a large number of books and articles both nationally and internationally. His research focuses on emerging subjectivities, visual culture and educational innovation and improvement.