Photographic Design Anthropology: Becoming through diffractive image-making and entangled visions in a Copenhagen immigrant youth context

The dissertation “ Photographic Designanthropology: Becoming through diffractive imagemaking and entangled visions” is concerned with potentials and limitations of practice -based photography and aesthetic practice in a de signanthropological context. It explores the visual (photography & design) in relation to issues of authorship, agency, participation and dissemination framed through feminist new materialist theory. Especially the theoretical framework of Agential Realism (Barad 2007) has been a source of inspiration. My empirical work takes place among a group of young immigrant girls in Copenhagen, DK. These girls have been invited to participate in various visual experiments concerning the becoming of identity through i mages. Knowledge concerning the method, as well as insights into the girls’ identity formation, is enacted through and embedded in the visuals, which have been produced in the project. I have explored how these ethnographic encounters may be visually medi ated, and in turn, how shared image- making processes themselves spark new insights and questions about photography in designanthropology. We (the participating girls and I) have in the project produced photographs of the girls (of which I also speak) while drawing on photography as a source of feedback in a performative circularity where method and matter are entangled. (Kember and Zylanski 2010). An important aspect of the visual process has included re -designing the visual outcome of experiments and the r e-configuring of field engagement -material, addressing the photographs as aesthetic and material objects aimed at both public and private circulation, as well highlighting photography as a highly entangled, performative and participatory practice.