Rubbing the room

This article describes a visual ethnographic intervention at a New York City public school. The intervention and the images that resulted—a series of life-size red wax rubbings on paper—work in relation to visual discourses and dynamics of contemporary school accountability. In the article, the author situates the images and image-making in the context of her broader multimodal qualitative study on teachers’ invisible labor in urban schools. The author makes sense of this visual ethnographic intervention through a series of three conceptual dyads: witnessing/ evidence; positionality/ art; and intimacy/ “tactile epistemology,” (Marks 2000).