ABSTRACT
This chapter explains examples of critical scholarship that may caution other researchers to attend more closely to the ways in which they use images. It focuses on the blurred boundary between the real and the imaginary within research. The chapter associates with the proposed departure from epistemological and methodological foundationalism in relation to images, especially when images are used as correspondences, signifiers, or witnesses of the real. In addition, the image has vital characteristics that enable it to feel what is being done to it a virtuality of images Baudrillard worried about the loss of fatal and vital illusions of images when images are violated, overburdened, and killed with meaning. Though Mitchell continues and expands upon Baudrillard's notion of active reproduction of images, Mitchell focuses more on the desire and wanting of images. Viewers of the images and participants within educational discourses sometimes uncritically treat the illusion of the Real discipline as the Real discipline.
