Vital illusions, images, and education

In normative qualitative research discourses, images represent and validate. Yet even many critical uses of images are not critical of the images themselves; rather, criticism is directed toward the reality that the images purportedly represent. In this chapter, we put forward examples of critical scholarship that may caution other researchers to attend more closely to the ways in which they use images. We focus on the blurred boundary between the ‘real’ and the imaginary within research. We also remain interested in possibilities associated with the proposed departure from epistemological and methodological foundationalism in relation to images, especially when images are used as correspondences, signifiers, or witnesses of the ‘real.'.