Object Medleys

Book excerpt: How do we get at the meanings of everyday (and not so everyday) objects, and how might these meanings enrich educational research? The study of objects is well established in fields such as archaeology, art history, communications, fine arts, museum studies, and sociology—but is still developing in education. Object Medleys: Interpretive Possibilities for Educational Research brings together 37 educational researchers from wide-ranging contexts and multiple knowledge fields to a dialogic space in which subjects and objects, living and nonliving, entangle as medleys to open up understandings of connections made with, between, and through objects. Object Medleys offers diverse, innovative modes and lenses for representing, interpreting, and theorising object studies. The book is distinctive within scholarship on object inquiry in that much of the research has been conducted within Southern African educational contexts. This is complemented by contributions from scholars based in Canada and the United Kingdom. The original research represented in each peer-reviewed chapter expands academic conversations about what counts as data and analysis in educational research. Overall, Object Medleys illuminates the applied and theoretical usefulness of objects in response to pressing educational and societal questions. “Object Medleys is a rich and fascinating exploration of new possibilities, with potential for research, teaching, and learning that seems almost unlimited. This book is a rich assembly of affordances for exploring and widening the role of objects in educational research. It relocates attention from language and text towards embodied and material storytelling practices where new and marginalised ways of expression can find their ways into classrooms, thereby opening completely new avenues of teaching and learning.” – Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen, Professor, Aalborg University, Denmark “In a time when materiality is being brought at the centre of critical inquiry in the social sciences and humanities, this edited collection offers unique insights into the relationship between objects, subjectivities, and learning. Beautifully written and cogently argued, the book breaks new ground by casting a critical spotlight on artefacts that might appear mundane at first sight but, on closer inspection, reveal complex patterns of educational potential.” – Tommaso M. Milani, Associate Professor, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa