XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 13-19, 2014)

July 13 - 19, 2014

910

Film Making, Photography, and Performative Understandings of Method

WG03 Visual Sociology (host committee)

Language: English

This session reflects on the intra-twining of method, theory, ontology and epistemology in filmmaking and photography within scholarly research projects and/or projects that blend scholarly and activist research. The session is informed by our positioning within ‘new materialism’, and ‘feminist materialism’ and entanglements with several on-going philosophical and practice ‘turns’ that are: material, post-constructionist, post humanist, affective, ontological, and performative. Papers in this session are located in one or more of these ‘turns’ and which reflect on performative understandings of visual methods. We are interested in generating conversation about what it might mean to produce visual sociologies that “generate not only representations of reality, but also the realities those representations depict” (Law, 2009). We are also keen to engage with what it means to move from representationalist to performative approaches to method while reflecting on the ethical and political dimensions of visual research aimed at “making a difference” (Bhavnani, 2008), “becom(ing) answerable for what we learn how to see” (Haraway, 1991), and holding “responsibility for the reconfigurings of which we are part” (Barad, 2007).