Interactive peace imagery – integrating visual research and peace education

In this article, we suggest incorporating visual images into peace education through interactive peace imagery (IPI). We will show, and illustrate with examples from our work, that interactive teaching creates a space for students to reflect upon their socializations, including visual ones, without which image interpretation cannot be fully explained. We begin by exploring photojournalism as a media that, while providing raw material for peace education, does not serve as a model for image interpretation. Emphasizing images’ interpretive openness, we suggest an alternative approach (IPI) that unearths, (re)vitalizes, and capitalizes on the plurality of meanings images carry with them. We focus on digitization and active interaction (seeing–changing–sharing) in a non-hierarchic teaching environment. In IPI, the classroom becomes a network: students interactively engage with visual images by regarding existing images, elaborating on them, changing them, sharing the changed images with their fellow students, or producing original images. Students become involved in the production process and their responsibility for both the image and the knowledge claims attached to it increases. Critical reflections on the suggested procedure in terms of quantity, time, authority, and violence conclude the paper.