Research: Adolescent Girls’ Photography: Searching for Feminism by Examining Meanings, Identities & Literacies
PhD student: Sarah Bonsor Kurki
What are adolescent girls’ photographic nexuses? How can their photos reveal their identities and how they are experiencing life? These are the questions that are shaping this feminist, arts-based research and as I am nearing the completion of data collection I am returning to them more and more often in my mind. I have been wondering what evidence of the girls’ lives the photographs can provide. I’ve spent five months viewing the participants’ photographs and hearing the accompanying stories. This collection of images allows me to view the girls’ photographies; to share a glimpse into the life events they feel are of note and worth recording in the moment. Because the photograph can act as a nexus, the participants and I are drawing connections between their lives and their images. This research provides a space for adolescent girls to express their life experiences visually and explore how they negotiate and navigate culture and society’s influences upon them. What is most surprising so far is how personal these collections of photographs seem now that I know each photographer and that provides an entrance into discovering the ways in which we can know about people through their photographs.
"Sarah’s PhD research, entitled Adolescent Girls’ Photography: Searching for Feminism by Examining Meanings, Identities & Literacies, centres on young women, feminism and their identities as represented through their photography. Using a critical feminist methodology, Sarah’s work explores how hegemonic ideas are perpetuated and internalized by young women who are at a formative period in their lives and whether they are able, using photography, to challenge these ideas. Using photographs as a nexus for young women, Sarah is exploring whether implicit and/or explicit connections can be made between their life experiences and their society, between their identity and how they express it, and between the texts they use and the texts they create." -Dr. Kathy Sanford
The Making of Science Field trips: A Cultural-Historical Approach to Explore Student-Student and Teacher-Student Interactions During Out-of-Classroom Science Projects
Reading for Pleasure in Three French Immersion Schools: The Perspectives of Teachers, Librarians and School Principals
Sylvia Pantaleo
MA - Language and Literacy
A Descriptive Study of Middle School ESL Students' Reading Moves and Uses of Visual Inscriptions When Inferring The Meaning of Unknown Words in A Science
Robert Anthony
MA - Language and Literacy
ESL Speaking Immigrant Women's Responses to Creating and Using a Photo-novel in Order to Raise Their Critical Consciousness and Understand a Specific Health Topic
