Visuella möjlighetsrum. Gymnasieelevers subjektsskapande i bild och medieundervisning

Abstract

This thesis examines upper secondary school pupils’ processes of subjectivation, resistance and creative becomings in visual art and media education. By using visual methodologies, pupils’ subjectivity is explored as relational and transformative, and as distributed in networks of power and desire. The empirical material was produced through pupils’ video diaries and a visual ethnographic classroom study. The aim of the study is addressed through the following research questions: What subject positions are enabled and made available for pupils in media education at upper secondary school? How is gender produced and negotiated in the visual art and media classroom? What educational human and non-human assemblages emerge, and with what effect for pupils’ becoming? The dissertation consists of three studies based on two empirical productions. The first is the licentiate thesis in which pupils’ becomings were highlighted as rhizomatic and as situated in relational, interlaced processes of learning with gender, affect, materiality, visual culture and informal learning. In the two following studies, visual ethnographic classroom observations were investigated in one study with masculinity as a theoretical lens, and in the other with a posthumanist perspective where the subject is considered an element in a pedagogical assemblage. In these studies, resistance against the pupil position is made visible, and so is the agency of materiality that created lines of flight away from the momentarily locked positions. The result shows that visual art and media education has democratic and pedagogical potentialities. Pupils’ perspectives can be differentiated, and creativity and informal competences can be highlighted through visual art and media education.