Pedagogies of Image: Photo-albums, Cultural Histories, & Educational Studies

In a beautifully arranged book titled, Photographic Memory that grew out of a partnership between Aperture Foundation and the Library of Congress and featuring photographic albums before the digital age, the case is made for defining photographic albums as a “unique genre, an art form” that “have their own place in the history of photography.” In my work, the question that is raised about photographic albums is not so much their disciplinary status and temporal trajectory, significant as that might be, but their pedagogic potential for remembering what has been repressed, silenced, and as Eduardo Cadava suggests, “deprived of historical expression.” Yet this is an approach that has remained marginal to and even outside of research pertinence within the field of educational studies. With a focus on a family album, I uncover the politics of familial representation through a single photograph of an interracial couple. The couple, a tenacious and optimistic daughter of Sakada – the name given to Filipinos recruited in the early twentieth century from the Philippine Islands by the Hawaiian Sugar Planter’s Association to work as laborers on the sugar plantations – and a German-Irish American airman provide an entry point to both highlight and displace the power and repetitions given to the American Dream narrative that immigrants are expected to desire and fulfill. I weave personal and family memoir with feminist cultural theory and historical research foregrounding the social-cultural temporalities to illustrate a revelatory picture of the intersection of U. S. class formation and racial inequality and oppression.

Dr. Hannah M. Tavares is Associate Professor in the department of Educational Foundations. She is the author of Pedagogies of the Image and co-editor of Educational Temporalities (forthcoming, Sense Publisher). She has essays in the journals Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Educational Theory, Educational Studies, Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, Theory & Event and chapter essays in the books Handbook of Research in the Social Foundations of Education, New Curriculum History, Troubling Gender in Education, and The History of Discrimination in U. S. Education: Marginality, Agency, and Power, and The State and the Politics of Knowledge.

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Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

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Center for Biographical Research, (808) 956-3774, biograph@hawaii.edu, http://blog.hawaii.edu/cbrhawaii/

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