Against capture: notes on recording and the problem of extraction in education research

Against Capture offers a methodological intervention to the current popularization of videomaking in participatory visual research, a genre of arts-based method, with a particular emphasis on the regime of extraction that is ignored in one of its most significant steps: recording. Often rendered as a visual metaphorical substitute or a backdrop, the author discusses how colonial relations to the built and natural environments have set the conditions for extractive practices where audio-visual recording as a form of capture demands a reimagined relational ethics to place. Within this extractive relation, the author observes how built and natural environments are understood as readily available and unlimited aesthetic resources for artmaking. This intervention seeks not to be prescriptive but rather offers a descriptive account of the epistemological and ontological contradictions in the current celebration of innovative approaches to research in education.