Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

658

Critical Perspectives on Visual Methodologies

WG03 Visual Sociology (host committee)

Language: English

It is almost cliché to observe the ubiquity of visual media and related visual practices. The accessibility and speed of information creation and sharing means the visible, along with the audible and the touchable, has become increasingly important as an interface between meanings, events and environments. 
Because the digitalization of communication has enabled new communicative and aesthetic practices of “vernacular image” production, and technologies of storage, computation and distribution have dramatically changed, fields such as visual sociology have felt the limitations of hermeneutic and ethnographic approaches for understanding these new mediations, and social formations. Many scholars have noted that the situation has challenged the analytical and methodological frames they used to rely on. 
This session invites exploratory research critically highlighting, and give examples of key themes emerging in visual methodologies. Papers that reflect on how neither verbal, visual, spatial nor temporal registers are any longer privileged registers, but understand that visibilities can materialize otherwise are welcome. Key considerations may include but are not limited to: how images become information; visual ciphers; networked image production etc.
Are also welcome: conceptual and methodological submissions examining the limits of visual discourse analysis, visual semiotics, and papers recognizing that new materialities and distribution patterns disturb or challenge institutionalized social and ontological boundaries through the affective and epistemological impacts of contemporary regimes of visuality.
This session asks the overarching question: How are certain forms of subjectivation and collectivities advanced in regimes of the visible and sayable, and do we need new ways to approach them? Posters: