Future Visions of Society: Visual Data and Ethics

The aim of this section is to review how visual analysis and diverse visual practices contribute to shaping future visions or expectations of society.

While we often see the future as imagined in particular ways (such as in the cases of disastrous climate change or more positive utopias of smart cities ) there is very little research on the application or contribution of visual methods as a way to inform or understand this process. As personal and corporate data accumulation is increasing, we also ought to look into the broader ecology of living with different kinds of visual data and social practices of contesting the new technologies or counter-imaginaries.

The key questions in this session are (not limited to) the following:

How are the socio-technological imaginaries employ imagery and future-oriented artefacts to promote promises of benevolent connectedness, liveability and safety?

How can we understand the emerging entanglements of visual data along the lines of politics, ethics and materiality?

What are the new ways of coping with ethical issues of (big) visual data production, use and analysis?

How can visual sociologists critically include big visual data into social analysis and compensate for existing deficiencies of pure computational methods?