Collaborative Seeing Workshop - Dr. Wendy Luttrell, CUNY

Workshop Description

In this workshop, participants will practice collaborative seeing by engaging with audio-visual data from a longitudinal project that put cameras in the hands of a group of diverse young people. This project aims to pry open the narrow lenses of 'educational gaze' through a visual research practice that is complex, multi-layered and humanizing.

Collaborative seeing combines an epistemological stance that complicates the notion of a singular 'child's' voice or ‘eyesight’; a set of methodological protocols and ethical practices; and an analytic process which aims to address the structural imbalances of power embedded in adult-child research relationships.

Speaker Biography

Wendy Luttrell is Professor of Urban Education, Sociology and Critical Social Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.  Her research on educational inequality examines the interplay of social structure and subjective experience in school settings, focusing on how a sense of belonging, exclusion, entitlement, constraint, possibility, success and failure take root in young people’s self-evaluations and actions. She is the author of two award-winning books on this topic, School-smart and Mother-wise: Working-Class Women’s Identity and Schooling (1997) and Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens (2003) and is also the editor of Qualitative Educational Research: Readings on Reflexive Methodology and Transformative Practice (2010).  She has published numerous articles on her longitudinal, visual ethnography that examine the role that gender, race, and immigrant status play in how diverse, young people growing up in urban, working-class communities portray their lives and learning through photographs and video.  She is completing a book on this project and its implications for the links between care and educational justice in schools and society. At a time when distorted and increasingly fractious visions of “marginalized” communities proliferate, the book and its multimodal platform of photographs and videos compels readers/viewers to reconsider their ways of seeing and valuing poor and working-class children of color and their childhoods. Throughout her career, Luttrell has directed community-based, university, and teacher inquiry projects dedicated to advancing social justice in and around schools and that promote innovative research and teaching practices, as well as curriculum development initiatives.  She also serves as Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education. http://www.wendyluttrell.org/

This workshop is sponsored by the Visual Methodologies Group. A light lunch will be served; please RSVP to Mary Ott (mott2@uwo.ca) by Mar 20/19 if you would like to attend.