Appearances Matter: The Visual in Educational History

The visual turn recovers new pasts. With a focus on education, this book seeks to present a body of reflections that question a certain historicism. It renovates historiographical debate about how to conceptualize visual media while presenting new themes and methods for researchers. Images are interrogated as part of régimes of the visible, of a history of visual technologies and visual practices. Considering the socio-material quality of the image, the analysis moves away from the use of images as mere illustrations of written arguments, and seriously questions the life and death of artifacts – that is, their particular historicity. Questioning the visual and material evidence in this ways means considering how, when, and in which régime of the visible it has come to be considered as a source, and what this means for the questions contemporary researchers may ask.