925.2
The Revenge of the Ineffable: Evaluating Visual Methodological Work
The Revenge of the Ineffable: Evaluating Visual Methodological Work
Tuesday, 17 July 2018: 15:50
Location: 203B (MTCC NORTH BUILDING)
Oral Presentation
Like other qualitative methodologies, visual approaches often wrestle with the questions of how to incorporate different ways of speaking to/with the object and still provide coherence while allowing the results to be emergent?
Those wresting with this problematic and conducting visually informed research, sometimes fall subject to the vigorous critiques offered by scholars such as Dr. Fuyuki Kurasawa (2013) who accuse visual methodologies of being either too descriptively oriented or too anecdotal; either too content focused (deterministic), or too centred on the networks of production and political economy of images bypassing the meaning potentials of the visuals themselves. Kurasawa complains of a lack of systematicity in process (reflexive follow-through), balance, and anecdotal tendencies in visually oriented or visually informed research particularly when it comes to analysis of large image collections. Systematicity attends to continuities, discontinuities and ruptures to address overemphasis on anecdotal evidence. Evaluation consists of addressing the approaches too focused on inner content, on the one hand, and on approaches focusing heavily on networks of production (political economy) on the other. If we take as a starting point however that: Visual methodological concerns contribute to affect and practice when they honour and recognize aesthetic and sense-based epistemics: we can say they are already post-disciplinary and “against method.” And thus require, in fact demand, other strategies of implementation and consequently of evaluation. This paper proposes then to take seriously Erin Manning's (2016) idea that method, “an apparatus of capture,” works “as a safeguard against the ineffable” (p. 32) in order to mobilize the concept of "visualicity" (Shields 2003) to provoke encounters with the ineffable in visual sociological research. Visual methodologies demand a evaluative strategies that work topologically across the interdisciplinary concerns reflecting in visual sociological work, in ways that must be considered, at this point, post-disciplinary.
Those wresting with this problematic and conducting visually informed research, sometimes fall subject to the vigorous critiques offered by scholars such as Dr. Fuyuki Kurasawa (2013) who accuse visual methodologies of being either too descriptively oriented or too anecdotal; either too content focused (deterministic), or too centred on the networks of production and political economy of images bypassing the meaning potentials of the visuals themselves. Kurasawa complains of a lack of systematicity in process (reflexive follow-through), balance, and anecdotal tendencies in visually oriented or visually informed research particularly when it comes to analysis of large image collections. Systematicity attends to continuities, discontinuities and ruptures to address overemphasis on anecdotal evidence. Evaluation consists of addressing the approaches too focused on inner content, on the one hand, and on approaches focusing heavily on networks of production (political economy) on the other. If we take as a starting point however that: Visual methodological concerns contribute to affect and practice when they honour and recognize aesthetic and sense-based epistemics: we can say they are already post-disciplinary and “against method.” And thus require, in fact demand, other strategies of implementation and consequently of evaluation. This paper proposes then to take seriously Erin Manning's (2016) idea that method, “an apparatus of capture,” works “as a safeguard against the ineffable” (p. 32) in order to mobilize the concept of "visualicity" (Shields 2003) to provoke encounters with the ineffable in visual sociological research. Visual methodologies demand a evaluative strategies that work topologically across the interdisciplinary concerns reflecting in visual sociological work, in ways that must be considered, at this point, post-disciplinary.