Feeling the Cut: Exploring the Use of Photography in Social Work Education

In: Qualitative social work: research and practice, Band 10, Heft 1, S. 86-105

Abstract

We are interested in exploring the use of visual arts in teaching relationality and difference within social work education. Our current research is based on the examination of photographic works on the subject of asylum seeking. In this article, we report on our findings from an analysis of the exhibit Leave to Remain. Leave to Remain is an installation of large format photographic prints, accompanied by individual testimonies. Beginning in 2002, photographer Diane Matar interviewed and photographed over 100 politically displaced people living in Britain. Her exhibit functions as a visual and oral history of how life in Britain is for people seeking asylum. In this article, we analyse Matar's work using contemporary visual methodology, and present segments of our conversation with one another that provide the texture of this methodology. We conclude that relationality and difference are imbued in questions about vulnerability and what Judith Butler (2004: 28) calls 'the fundamental sociality of embodied life' — that we are each 'implicated in lives that are not our own'.