Photos of (no)thing: The becoming of data about sexuality at school

Abstract

This paper asks, what ‘newness’ (Springgay & Zaliwska, 2015) does a new materialist feminist engagement with photos of ‘nothing’ produce for thinking about images as data in research about sexuality at school? Somewhat unusually, this paper takes as its focus – photos of what appear to be, nothing. These indecipherable photos were captured by student photo-diarists as part of research into the sexual cultures of schooling. Traditionally, these photos would not constitute data because they contain no identifiable people or objects, are blurry and were classified by photo-diarists as ‘mistakes’. This paper involves a revisiting of these images drawing on the work of Barad (2007), Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010) and MacLure (2013). It considers how ideas around onto-epistemology, intra-activity and agential realism might undo and unknow the researcher’s previous encounters with them. The paper argues feminist new materialism challenges the nature of what counts as data about sexuality at school and thereby the ontology of data about sexuality itself.