Discourses and Politics of Visual Research Methods

The proposed paper deals with and questions two things at the same time: visual methods used and studying animals. A juxtaposition of the two questions, the paper argues, renders visual methods problematic in that visual methods deliver outputs that can be associated with methodological human-ism and homo-centrism. Against this, the paper first presents a survey of visual methodologies in terms of discourses of methodological human-ism by presenting their constructions of the world as apprehended by human animals. Afterwards, it discusses the (im)possibility of methodological faber-ism. The paper finally wages a discussion on the politics of methodological human-isms in social research.