This presentation introduces Fluid Reality as a theoretical lens that emerged from a visual study of bilingual (Arab–Hebrew) kindergartens in Israel/Palestine. The concept arose from close observation of the visual environments of these classrooms: the drawings, photographs, and wall displays that revealed how the space itself narrates stories of identity, memory, and conflict. The distinction between symmetrical and fluid visual practices, observed across different kindergartens, became the ground from which the concept of Fluid Reality evolved.

Building on Rose’s (2007) and Banks’s (1995) approaches to visual research, the visual image becomes a site of theorizing, where aesthetic and pedagogical gestures construct meaning, identity, and ideology. The kindergarten wall thus becomes a theoretical surface—an intersection of art, narrative, and politics.

Fluid Reality challenges what I term Symmetrical Reality; the habitual, seemingly “balanced” way of organizing the world through oppositions and categories. Drawing on Sleeter’s (2024) critical multicultural framework, which exposes and resists structural inequalities, the fluid extends this critique by moving beyond symmetrical representation toward relational, open-ended ways of knowing.

In this sense, pedagogy is an act of political imagination and resistance (Giroux, 1992; Greene, 2008). The fluid reframes theory itself as a practice of refusal, a gentle but radical interruption of the binaries that dominate dark times: us/them, truth/falsehood, occupier/occupied.

The Fluid as Theory thus imagines knowledge and pedagogy as dynamic, permeable, and alive, suggesting that ambiguity, softness, and aesthetic openness—often dismissed as neutrality or non-positionality—can become powerful forms of critical and aesthetic thought, and of political hope.