Special Issue: Visual Research Methods in Education

19 Nov Special Issue: Visual Research Methods in Education

CALL FOR PAPERS

BEIJING INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF EDUCATION

In the digital age, people like visually expressing and sharing their ideas of the world. For example, they take photos or make videos and then post them on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram to visually communicate with others about their social lives. In this sense, the world nowadays is not only narratively and discursively but also visually constructed and represented. Thus, visual research methods are required to help us to understand the visual dimension of the world. In different disciplines and fields of social sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and community studies, visual research methods are widely used to study a variety of social phenomena. According to their experiences, the visual research methods empower researchers to study how people perceive and constructed the world visually and to explore how the visually constructed world influence people’s social lives. Their experiences also show that visual images may evoke richer information on human consciousness than numbers and words alone for a deeper analysis of social phenomena. Thus, there is a raising of interests in the development of visual research methods in social sciences.

Visual research methods are also useful for education, providing new insights, directions and agendas for education research. For example Visual Studies in 2007 published a special issue on ‘visual curriculum’ in which the manuscripts demonstrated how visual research methods facilitated us to understand schooling in a different way of the traditional research methods. In 2016, Moss and Pini published a book to introduce the potential contributions of visual research methods to education research. Despite such valuable attempts to promote visual research methods, it is still rare to find research studies applying these methods in education. Thus, this special issue aims to provide a platform to discuss the methodological insights and contributions of visual research methods to education research. Although the special issue is concerned about methodological issues of visual research methods, it particularly welcomes manuscripts with a methodological focus discussed in relation to an empirical study. The themes that authors may wish to address include, but are not limited to:

1. Ontology, epistemology, and methodology visual education research
2. Advantages and disadvantages of visual research methods compared with the traditional methods in education
3. Research design of visual education research
4. Data collection in visual education research
5. Data analysis in visual education research
6. Power and representation in visual education research
7. Ethical issues in visual education research
8. Implications of visual education research to educational practices

The Beijing International Review of Education (BIRE) published by Brill Academic Publishers (https://brill.com/) starts in 2019. This Special issue will be edited by Dr. Kwok Kuen Tsang.

Please send an abstract of 300 words to Dr. Kwok Kuen Tsang by 31 Dec 2018 at kktsang@bnu.edu.cn and a copy to tbesley@bnu.edu.cn. Once the abstract is accepted, the full paper needs to be submitted by 31 July 2019. All papers will go through a rigid process of double-blind peer review.

Beijing International Review of Education

Aims and Scope
This international journal is a subscription-based, peer reviewed, general review of educational theory, history, philosophy and related empirical sciences that aims to publish a wide range of articles in English. It has a particular focus on the contribution of education– socially, morally and economically–to society, culture and economy. The journal welcomes articles on significant new research as well as material of a more reflective nature. The Beijing International Review of Education aims to publish articles that are of interest not only to academics and policy makers but also teachers and members of the public. All articles in this journal will undergo rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening, and double-blind peer review. The journal publishes four issues per year.