Abstract In this article the life of droids is explored through a weaving of scenes, dialogue, analysis, theory and an exhibition. The imagery and text are employed to work through the experiences of the droids and the relationships that are revealed, or perhaps even presenced (Heidegger, 1993). The works of Heidegger and Camus on technology and science, the story of Viktor Frankenstein’s absence of care for ‘his’ creation, and insights from Daniel Wallace’s book, Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Droids add textual flavour to the images that have been produced by the authors and that invite exploration of life in the age of droidean corporeal horror. In this exhibition of machine lives, the images are presented as uncanny moments (Rancière, 2010), revealing questions concerning technology and being (Heidegger, 1993). The educational intention of this work is not to emancipate machine life through the horror stories of droidean cultures and communities, but rather to offer insights into the error of Modern mastery.

Abstract This article explores how TikTok videos, situated in a postdigital space and means of engagement, visibilise divergent responses to right-wing, populist political governments with anti-liberal, anti-socialist policies, offering video-based provocations for teachers. Even traditionally left-wing havens are shifting to right-wing populism, seemingly exemplified by the Aotearoa Coalition Government, implicating the prevalence of this phenomena. Due to education being an ideological battlefield, teachers are heavily implicated by such shifts, encouraging a visibilising of spaces and strategies for their responses. In this article, Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic philosophy, with special attention to his concept of carnivalesque, is brought into conversation with TikTok videos, facilitating a means to conceptualise and analyse this postdigital, divergent underground as a mirthing means of speaking back. These mocking, visual responses to right-wing governments are then signalled as provocations for teachers experiencing a rise of populist policies. This article concludes by suggesting how teachers may utilise TikTok videos to politically speak back in divergent ways to right-wing governments, encouraging creative and diverse engagements in this postdigital platform.

Abstract Using a cartographic approach, this article addresses ableism in the Chilean educational system. By analyzing audiovisual production, and specifically, the creation of storyboards, theoretical-methodological tools are provided for mapping desire flows and micro-movements produced in and about the public school toward and against the production of able educational institutions. Thus, the analysis stresses how human and nonhuman materialities mutually affect each other in an educational context. By focusing on the analysis of videos and storyboards, new discursive-material relationships appear in the school, which allow us to recognize and problematize ableist practices, and at the same time, open spaces for new creative approaches to challenge the able school norm.

Abstract This article describes the relationships between cruelty, schooling and the possibilities that the school offers as a refuge in the face of the inexorable circumstances that seal the fates of a large part of the population living in conditions marked by intensifying inequalities. The work is based on a multiple design which included an audiovisual production workshop in 2022 and 2023 involving students and teachers from a high school in the Buenos Aires metropolitan region and the university. Through the biographical-narrative method, students have carried out in-depth interviews, collaborative work and activities shared in the same school with one of the teachers for over three years. Research results express how, as perceived by high school students and teachers, the school serves as a space that saves others and themselves, a place of support, as well as transmission and education, even amidst instances of cruelty in their daily experiences.

Abstract This article offers a means of analysing social networking, visual dialogues of emojis, gif s (images in the Graphics Interchange Format), embedded images, videos, and url s (Uniform Resource Locators). Doing so addresses these often overlooked and undervalued forms of visual communication, suggesting a unique means of gaining insights into their use within online interactions. Utilising a Bakhtinian methodology, the author extracts excerpts from her research, situated within Facebook, to demonstrate a Bakhtinian genre analysis, a framework that the author contends is adaptable to multiple social networking spaces. Highlighting emojis, gif s, embedded images, videos, and url s as integral components of online communication, an emphasis is placed on how the text dances with the visual, presenting a nuanced framework for such an analysis. Consequently, an argument is developed for the significance of visual dialogues in contemporary online spaces, and the need for researchers to better understand these dynamic forms of communication, offered through Bakhtinian dialogism.

Abstract In recent years, school building policy in New Zealand has emphasised the development of flexible learning spaces (fls). Through deliberate design choices, flexible learning spaces are intended to promote student-centred and collaborative teaching practice, creating an innovative learning environment which is adaptable and future-focussed. However, this intended practice is not always realised. This article draws on data from a study examining the practice of seven English teachers working in a flexible learning space in one New Zealand secondary school. Using Lefebvre’s spatial triad of conceived, perceived and lived space, the author will argue that elements of the learning space are imbued with layers of visual symbolism, highlighting the tensions between the rhetoric and the reality of innovative practice in flexible learning spaces. While the policy intent of the flexible learning space is made visible through elements of its design, the use of the space by teachers and students indicates that their visual interpretations of these elements can serve to reinforce teaching and learning practices that flexible learning spaces are designed to disrupt. These findings highlight that teachers require increased spatial competence and critical awareness of visual learning space elements to maximise the potential of fls for innovative teaching and learning.

Abstract Film making provides a tool for Indigenous peoples of West Papua to tell a story, consolidate community collective memory (solidarity), support human rights advocacy and assist trauma healing. Moreover, films raise critical awareness among Indigenous Papuans in relation to the outside world. Film making allows Indigenous voices to be seen and heard by others beyond West Papua. So, film is an important media tool with the potential to enable vulnerable Indigenous communities to produce knowledge, and tell stories about life and culture from their own perspectives. It also supports Indigenous West Papuan communities to document human rights abuses and to advocate for their human rights in the international arena. Film making therefore provides an important medium to expose the oppressive realities of Indigenous peoples’ lives in in West Papua, so often distorted by the propaganda of the occupying Indonesian military. This article explains the context of film making in West Papua. Next it shares some personal experiences of film making in West Papua before sharing three approaches adopted by Indigenous West Papuan filmmakers. These film making approaches empower Indigenous communities to tell their own stories and support their own decolonization goals.

Abstract Bee Movie is a short film that invites questions for conversations on visual ethics. The viewer is invited into a world of circular, tragic and absurd questions concerning what a filmmaker, an abstract writer, a journal editor, and a film viewer ought to do when observing the apparent reality of a bee’s circular attempts to escape a pond. As a filmmaker and abstract writer, one does not want to tell the viewer and reader how one feels about this bee, bees, insects, ponds, water, life, death and circles. And one feels obliged not to explain the context through which the film came to life as the bee was engaged in efforts that might be narrated as lifesaving but also as another complex of efforts entirely. As an open image, without our textual dissection (or, at least, with a dampening of that dissection to an abstract and with a few questions and challenges), we regard Bee Movie as inviting questions about the ethics of the use of images as pedagogy. Whatever we thought about whether and how to share this film, we find ourselves in 359 other relationships, and always back again to what we assumed might be the starting position.

Abstract In this article, the authors intra-act with Barad’s (2007) conceptual toolkit to examine noncomplaint learning of a ropemaking activity at The Norwegian Fisheries Museum in Bergen. Barad’s concepts of intra-action and diffraction allow us to perceive the rope as noncompliantly diffracting into the two different SpaceTimes of the 19th and 21st centuries. The former SpaceTime is intra-actively constituted by historical ropemaking craftship and the museum staff, and the latter by the children’s approaching the ropemaking through toys and play. In the overlap of the entanglements of the two SpaceTimes, noncompliant and ‘new areas of curiosity’ (Wertsch 2002, p. 123) unfold and continue the rope’s diffraction into the city. By following the intra-active community of Ida and the rope, the authors map entanglements of more-than-human worldings and conclude with a call for more museal diffractions that can (intra-)activate the museum’s relational capacities in the ecology of the city.

Abstract This article explores a series of non-linear films produced in an undergraduate digital arts course. Drawing on Deleuze’s (1989) concept of the time-image, the researcher theorizes how filmmaking produces events of duration (Deleuze, 1991) for which bodies, living and nonliving, are actively engaged in processes of becoming. She makes connections with what Deborah Bird Rose (2017) calls shimmer with practices of immediation (Manning, 2019) a brilliance that brings us into “the experience of being part of a vibrant and vibrating world” (Rose, 2017, p. 53). The researcher argues that filmmaking is a shimmering practice in a kaleidoscope world – capable of generating affective, embodied, and sensorial events – practices-in-the-making. Thus the article aligns with the goal of this special topic: to analyze affective and somatic modes of filmmaking and their potential to create virtual openings in the ubiquitous quality of sensation in the city (Thain, 2019).