5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

The era of the Anthropocene can be considered paradoxical. While it includes and celebrates the notion of a ‘global village’, characterised by fluid communication and mobility, it is also an era that defines and shapes the identities of individuals’ and social groups’ through the making of borders. Whether physical or intangible, borders result in building common entities like transnational, national and local communities. At the same time border making also creates exclusive communities whose real or symbolic power can significantly impact societies, social relations, civic participation, modes of knowledge production and access to knowledge. Thus, borders become part of the lived experience of individuals and social groups as they manifest in the form of social hierarchies and oppression while also serving as sites for organizing resistance and expressions of resilience. In the face of border making as a positive or contradictory mode of community making, how can visual sociology interrogate justice in the Anthropocene?

This session welcomes abstracts for presentations that investigate how visual sociology explores the following questions:

How do borders represent processes of identity making, of community making as well as processes of social exclusion?

How can visual sociology capture the tangible and symbolic borders that shape identities and communities?

How does visual sociology contribute to activist research in relation to borders?

This session aims to focus on the ‘global south,’ where the mobility and circulation of people, their ideas, and modes of knowledge production are limited by physical and invisible borders embedded in the coloniality of power.