The moving image in education research: Reassembling the body in classroom video data

While audio recordings and observation might have dominated past decades of classroom research, video data is now the dominant form of data in the field. Ubiquitous videography is standard practice today in archiving the body of both the teacher and the student, and vast amounts of classroom and experiment clips are stored in online archives. Yet little to no research interrogates how this data partakes in the history of scientific cinema, assembling particular images of teacher and student bodies, nor how the digital nature of video devices might indeed challenge theoretical assumptions about social science more generally. This paper situates current video research practices within the history of scientific cinema and opens up the discussion about how these practices are linked to shifting structures of industrial labor. The paper uses the work of Gilles Deleuze – on art, cinema and the body – as a means of provoking the reader to consider new ways of working with the moving image.