Mixed metaphors, mixed messages and mixed blessings: how figurative imagery opens up the complexities of transforming higher education

Abstract

Dina Zoe Belluigi, Andrea Alcock, Veronica Farrell and Grace Idahosa reflect on figurative imagery in their research practices to expose the “hidden curriculum of higher education”. Their reflection recounts discursive processes in an attempt to “make sense” of “the modes of politics” in which they engage.
 
 How to cite this reflective piece: 
 BELLUIGI, Dina Zoe; ALCOCK, Andrea; FARRELL, Veronica; IDAHOSA, Grace. Mixed metaphors, mixed messages and mixed blessings: how figurative imagery opens up the complexities of transforming higher education. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South. v. 3, n. 2, p. 110-120, Sept. 2019. Available at: https://sotl-south-journal.net/?journal=sotls&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=105&path%5B%5D=50
 
 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
 To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Navigating old and new terrains of academic practice in higher education: indelible and invisible marks left from the Covid-19 lockdown

“…As collective autoethnography, we were consciously activating our recollections of our individual experiences to explore possible interpretations of the conditions from intentionally chosen images and text (individually and then sequentially) to voice and to elicit responses on a topic. Informed by critical approaches to visual pedagogy, we were thus interested in the possibilities of the visual narrative process for transgression, creativity and play within this project, because of our awareness that dispassionate, narrative realism has often failed in its attempt to measure the human experiences of academics (Belluigi et al, 2019). The acts of composing a photograph and then composing a sequential narrative involve conscious processes of selection, presentation and aesthetics-making that are of value precisely because they complicate assumptions about the immediate, authentic 'capturing' of evidence or 'voicing' of testimony: 'A fact of primary social importance is that the photograph is a place of work, a structured and structuring space within which the reader deploys, and is deployed by, what codes he or she is familiar with in order to make sense' (Burgin, 1982: 153).…”