ABSTRACT

Photographic images are increasingly present in everyday life, as a medium of social interaction and commentary. The chapter addresses fundamental issues about identity, representation, participation and power which underlie participatory practice, and more broadly, educational practice. Reading from the community-transformative perspective, education in practice is often essentially a mechanism of exploitation. The enlightenment model of education as a personal transformative project, so neutral at first glance, is also stolidly individualist, and within it lies the seed of an individualistic, competitive process. Exploitation is sustained by power over representation and through relations of domination, and as Bourdieu and Passeron have shown, through misrecognition of these relations by people who are subject to that exploitation. Howes Andy Miles Susie Photographic images are increasingly present in everyday life, as a medium of social interaction and commentary. It is, therefore, unsurprising that they are now widely taken up in the field of education and educational research.