Facts

Contact person:
Edith Fon
Financer:
  • Department of Culture Language and Media at Malmö University
Responsible at MaU:
Edith Fon
Time frame:
01 September 2023 - 31 August 2028
Faculty/department:
Research environment :
Research subject:

About the project

This project explores different encounters with visual texts as reading practices, pedagogical practices, and meaning-making processes. It draws on posthumanist and new materialist theories to examine how encounters with picturebooks and graphic novels expand, and at times, challenge opportunities for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning. By doing so, it explores the contribution of Visual Literacy Education to classroom practice.
The project comprises three interconnected studies.

  • The first study is a conceptual paper that introduces the project's central theoretical concepts and demonstrates their application through a diffractive reading of four visual texts: three picturebooks and one graphic novel. The study examines how visual texts can be read through a diffractive lens and considers the implications of such readings for visual literacy education. It asks: How can visual texts be read diffractively, and what are the implications for visual literacy education?
  • The second study is an empirical educational ethnography that adopts a diffractive ethnographic approach within a Grade 4-6 EFL classroom. Focusing on a teacher’s work with the four visual texts, it investigates how visual literacy pedagogy emerges through classroom encounters and how it is continually reconfigured through material-discursive entanglements among teachers, students, texts, classroom spaces, and pedagogical activities. It asks: How does visual literacy pedagogy emerge, and what forms does it take in classroom encounters with visual texts?
  • The third article is an empirical educational ethnography that adopts a diffractive ethnographic approach and a reader response design. Focusing on students’ engagements with visual texts, it examines how affective responses emerge through material-discursive intra-actions in classroom encounters. Through a diffractive analysis of student-produced artefacts, the study traces how affective intensities become materialised and intelligible. It asks: How do affective responses emerge through material-discursive intra-actions in classroom encounters with visual texts, and how can their intensities be traced in student-produced artefacts?