Visual Sociology

This text discusses a variety of approaches in visual sociology, including exemplars that connect visual sociology to the history of documentary, photojournalism and art photography.

This book provides a user-friendly guide to the expanding scope of visual sociology, through a discussion of a broad range of visual material, and reflections on how such material can be studied sociologically. The chapters draw on specific case-study examples that examine the complexity of the hyper-visual social world we live in, exploring three domains of the ‘relational image’: the urban, social media, and the aerial. Zuev and Bratchford tackle issues such as visual politics and surveillance, practices of visual production and visibility, analysing the changing nature of the visual. They review a range of methods which can be used by researchers in the social sciences, utilising new media and their visual interfaces, while also assessing the changing nature of visuality. This concise overview will be of use to students and researchers aiming to adopt visual methods and theories in their own subject areas such as sociology, visual culture and related courses in photography, new-media and visual studies.

With technological developments transforming our culture into a more visual one, this book sets a new standard for visual sociology. In this, Chaplin examines still images, diagrams and the visual representation of the written text.

Written as a book for undergraduate students as well as scholars, Surviving Dictatorship is a work of visual sociology and oral history, and a case study that communicates the lived experience of poverty, repression, and resistance in an authoritarian society: Pinochetâe(tm)s Chile. It focuses on shantytown women, examining how they join groups to cope with exacerbated impoverishment and targeted repression, and how this leads them into very varied forms of resistance aimed at self-protection, community-building, and mounting an offensive. Drawing on a visual database of shantytown photographs, art, posters, flyers, and bulletins, as well as on interviews, photo elicitation, and archival research, the book is an example of how multiple methods might be successfully employed to examine dictatorship from the perspective of some of the least powerful members of society. It is ideal for courses in social inequalities, poverty, race/class/gender, political sociology, global studies, urban studies, womenâe(tm)s studies, human rights, oral history, and qualitative methods.

Just what is a picture worth? Qualitative research is dominated by language. However, researchers have recently shown a growing interest in adopting an image-based approach. This is the first volume dedicated to exploring this approach and will prove an invaluable sourcebook for researchers in the field. The book covers a broad scope, including theory and the research process; and provides practical examples of how image-based research is applied in the field. It discusses use of images in child abuse investigation; exploring children's drawings in health education; cartoons; the media and teachers.

The potential of visual research methods in the sociology of religion is vast, but largely untapped. This comes as a surprise, however, given the visual, symbolic, and material nature of religion and spirituality. Evidence of religious faith and practice is materially present in everything from clothing and jewelry to artifacts found in people’s homes and workplaces. Not only is religion’s symbolic and material presence palpable throughout society, it also informs attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of countless people worldwide. Words-and-numbers approaches to social research, however, sometimes miss important dimensions of religion and spirituality in the contemporary world. Seeing Religion is an invitation to a visual sociology of religion. Contributors draw from their current research to discuss the application of visual methods to the study of religion and spirituality. Each chapter stimulates the sociological imagination through examples of research techniques, analytical approaches, and methodological concerns.

Visual Sphere as an object of sociological enquiry must be understood in terms of its complex interconnections with social relations, within which visual materials and visual knowledge are produced, circulated and consumed. This book aims to build a bridge between scholars in practice-based visual research, visual methodologists and researchers dealing with conceptual issues in visual sociology. Questions addressed by this text include: How is the visual relationship of the urban dwellers to the urban landscape being established? How are images of conflict being disseminated, what are the politics of their dissemination, and what limits and potential do they carry? What are the paradoxes of the phenomenon of iconoclasm? How can we visually access the phenomenon of urbanization? What are the major challenges for visual researchers using photo-elicitation interviews, focus groups or computer-based methods?

Visual sociology has been part of the sociological vocabulary since the 1970s, but until now there has not been a comprehensive text that introduces this area. Written by one of the founding fathers in the field, Visual Sociology explores how the world that is seen, photographed, drawn, or otherwise represented visually is different from the world that is represented through words and numbers. Doug Harper’s exceptional photography and engaging, lively writing style will introduce: visual sociology as embodied observation visual sociology as semiotics visual sociology as an approach to data: empirical, narrative, phenomenological and reflexive visual sociology as an aspect of photo documentary visual sociology and multimedia. This definitive textbook is made up of eleven chapters on the key topics in visual sociology. With teaching and learning guidance, as well as clear, accessible explanations of current thinking in the field, this book will be an invaluable resource to all those with an interest in visual sociology, research methods, cultural geography, cultural theory or visual anthropology.