Visual Industry Perspectives on Production and Meaning Making

Abstract

The focus of this part has been on the relationship between production, meaning making and visual research with children and young people. The part was introduced by Jennifer Rowsell who described how meaning and therefore production can manifest in different ways, through a range of visual media even when the message being communicated is very similar. This was highlighted in relation to two examples communicating the idea of ‘hope’. Rowsell then illustrated this in relation to the Community Arts Zone project that looked at how meaning is made in relation to a range of modes. The two following chapters reported research projects that had experimented with different ways of making meaning in the visual mode in order to understand children’s perspectives. To these ends, the author-researchers described how different visual media were experimented with to find the best fit to record and make sense of the project contexts and the child-participants’ knowledge in relation to this. In doing so, creativity was shown to be an important part of using visual research methods with children and young people. Further, creativity became a necessity as more traditional data collection methods and means of analysis were found to be an insufficient match for gaining insights from the research participants, because their age, and their epistemological understanding, was different from methods that had been designed by and largely for adults.