Supplementary Notes
“Looking Through Windows”
In this video presentation, I document the journey travelling
from home to university during the first year of my doctoral
program as an experience of “looking through windows.” I
seek to represent the mundane quality of this journey while
highlighting the many ways the doctoral journey may be
undertaken, and I articulate these possibilities visually,
in photographs that are ‘everyday’ images,
reflecting my perception of the messiness of doctoral studies
as a kind of visual poststructuralism.
I created snapshot photographs to reflect the aesthetic
qualities of routines by using three different formats—prints,
slides, and digital images. All images taken while driving
were created with an old instamatic camera. These images
were not made with the eye, but with the senses. I sensed
the images as I passed, often at high speeds, by simply
pointing but not viewing the composition, and spontaneously
clicking the shutter. Many of these images were created
from the shoulder. I did not know what the image would
be until the film was developed. Stationary images are
both digital and slide images using Velvia film. These
different ways of looking through windows parallel the
effect of layering that is the doctoral experience for
me.
Looking through windows in a doctoral program is a simple
metaphor. Generally, we look ahead, straight on, focusing
on a singular goal. I speculate that only when we turn
our seeing to the left, or the right, do we question boundaries
of thought and our understandings. At the boundaries, there
is blurring, as in snapshot photographs taken at high speeds.
There are ruptures, and tensions exist continually between
focusing straight head, and attending to the margins during
the doctoral experience. I believe it is in the tensions
that there are entry points to research and to understanding
the process of becoming within the experience of doctoral
studies in different ways. |
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About
the Author
Anita Sinner is completing
her doctorate degree in Curriculum Studies at the University
of British Columbia. Her research interests are arts-based
inquiry, gender construction, auto/biography and new media.
Anita teaches art in the Teacher Education program and
she is an exhibiting photographic artist.
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