I don’t know what’s about September, but it’s always so intense in terms of all possible work tasks. One year this is about founding application, the other year it’s about conferencing, and then yet another one is about teaching. This year it started already on September 1st, with a session on “What is… visual research?” collaboratively organized with Dr. Mélodine Sommier at the Methods Festival at the University of Jyväskylä.

Following, I was teaching an intensive doctoral course on Visual Research Methods and Methodologies at the same university. This was a new course, which I wanted to introduce already a while ago as I noticed a clear need for it over the years I worked at this university. We had four very intensive Tuesdays (20 teaching hours in total), during which we discussed our ways of seeing and interpreting visual imagery, methods to analyze found images, and participatory visual techniques. As always, I was worried if it was “enough” and how well it helped and guided participants toward their future endeavours with visual research. I was worried to the extend that I did not ask for the course feedback. And here it came, some wonderful comments from the participants, spontaneously sent to me by the participants:

Thank you again for the course – what an absolute delight it was! My mind is buzzing with ideas for future research.

I must thank you for the inspiring, clear, intellectual building blocks giving course of research. The group and the lecturer (i.e. you) empowered me enormously.

And I’m also continuing my Friday teaching trips to Tampere University to teach a course on Visual Cultures and Technologies. This year, in addition to challenges of the hybrid format, I’m also having a larger group of 34 students in the course. I’m still trying to devote as much as possible time for questions, discussions and group activities, and I’m so much looking forward to students’ visual case studies they will introduce in the second part of the course.

So, yes, September… or, well, it’s October already!