Visual Methodologies (VM - E-Journal)
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Materiality and the meaning of aging
Get PDFThis photo essay offers an alternative perspective on aging and its experience by exploring materiality—how human bodies and material things co-construct meaning—through a sock monkey-making workshop in an independent living facility in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Ethnographic photography is utilized as a method to unfold and portray seniors’ creative practices through their encounters with materials and bodies. By demonstrating a materiality approach, this essay invites researchers, educators, and community professionals to reimagine seniors’ creative practices, and programs supporting such practices, through understanding how aging is inseparable from material environments. It provokes us to rethink how seniors’ material encounters may reconceptualize the notion of agency for seniors. Such an approach allows us to move beyond stereotypical impressions of what aging is about or should be, instead focusing on how bodies, artifacts, and spaces among other things are intertwined in particular moments
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Get PDFVisual methods are flourishing across the social sciences, and the draw-and-write technique is an increasingly popular research design. This paper contributes to the methodological conversation on the draw-and-write technique by addressing the differing impacts of participant-generated drawings made in black and white, or color. As background for the topic, we first comment upon the history of color in media and the arts, the physiological mechanisms of color perception, and the sociocultural construction of color. Then, we analyze three significant draw-and-write studies of teachers (Weber & Mitchell, 1995), information (Hartel, 2014a), and energy (Bowden, Lockton, Gheerawo, & Brass, 2015), with analytical attention upon the matter of color in the research design and outcome. Subsequently, the factor of color is discussed in relation to a research project’s practicality, paradigm, topic, participants, and dissemination formats. Attention is given to the chromatic problem of depicting human beings in drawings, as well as the feasibility of releasing control of color entirely. By the conclusion of the paper, enthusiasts of the draw-and-write technique will be able to more strategically align the spectrum of their drawing instruments with their research constraints and objectives
Screening Participatory Videos and Cellphilms (Cellphone + Film Production) in Live-Audience and Online Spaces
Get PDFEngaging in participatory visual research provides opportunities to share provocative research results with a variety of audiences in order to shift public perception, critique policy, and work toward social change. A range of ethical issues emerge in screening participatory videos and cellphilms (cellphone + film production) in front of live audiences and in online spaces. Through a reflection on two participatory visual research projects working with youth in New Brunswick Canada, we describe the opportunities and challenges to screening and archiving participant-produced videos. We argue that project facilitators have an ethical obligation to participants and audiences in navigating screenings in person and online contexts. It is the facilitators’ obligation to the participants, their works, and our projects to react and respond when audiences laugh derisively, engage in microaggressions, provide hateful comments, and when audiences celebrate the participants’ works in surface level or unserious ways
Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods
Get PDFBuilding on the extensive work presented in the first edition (Margolis and Pauwels 2011), the 2nd edition of the Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods (Pauwels & Mannay, 2020) provides a diversity of perspectives of visual approaches to research. The breadth and quality of this handbook is impressive with contributions from scholars working from different theoretical perspectives and across disciplinary boundaries
“THIS IS FOOTBALL”
No full textUniversity athletics are “big business” in the United States, but this is not yet the case in Canadian higher education institutions where there are fewer institutional affiliations with media-promoting academic sports organizations such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Unlike their American counterparts who rely heavily on revenue from the media rights for televised sports broadcasts and other licensing opportunities, Canadian universities leverage funding for athletics programs mainly through student fees (Lenskyj, 2004). While such revenues may permit a viable varsity athletic program at most Canadian institutions, student fees are rarely sufficient to support the construction of new facilities such as football stadiums. This photo essay explores one university’s deteriorating football stadium during a period of campus debate regarding its renovation or relocation, offering the opportunity to reflect upon the role of such facilities in the life of a Canadian university and the relationship between the academic use of lands and imagery appropriated from Indigenous peoples (Goldfarb, 2015; Udy, 2018)
OUT OF THE PICTURE: DRAWING THE NARRATION OF FILM
Get PDFImagine for a moment a story that does not have solid form. It is nebulous but resonant. It is an idea. Between this state and a completed cinematic work, there is normally a process of artistic inquiry. Conventionally, creating a narrative for film involves constructing written treatments, drafting scripts and compiling shot lists. However, a small number of filmmakers use drawing as a visual method to create and shape knowledge into communicative form.
Although film is understood as a visual medium, we rarely talk about visual methods used in its early stages of development. Increasingly, visual methods are used in a range of disciplines including sociology, psychology, geography and health care (Barbour, 2014; Pain 2012). However, they are normally applied to data gathering or analysis. Such methods embrace a variety of approaches including photo elicitation (Glaw, Kable, Hazelton & Inder, 2017; Meo, 2010), analysing found data (Prosser & Loxley, 2008), collaborative filmmaking (Parr, 2007) and the use of video diaries (Holliday, 2004).
In cinema we generally associate visual methods with principal photography (filming) and postproduction processing. However, in this article I will discuss an approach to the narrative development of the short film Sparrow, where visual methods were employed from the earliest stages of narrative gestation through to the moments just before the camera began recording
Visualizing Climate Change Adaptation
Get PDFThis article analyzes how humanitarian and/or development organizations acting as intermediaries between scientists and vulnerable populations aim to make environmental changes visible while trying to meet local needs and demands for sustainable livelihoods. Based on an in-depth organizational case study in Southern Thailand, the research analyses the use of visualization tools to foster environmental knowledge and literacy while supporting both policymaking as well as citizen engagement. Drawing on insights from sociology of organizations, the study discusses the organizational reasons for the use of visualization tools, outlining the underlying coercive, mimetic and normative pressures that facilitate their proliferation in the context of environmental communication. The results show that both the participatory approach as well as the use of audiovisual and digital tools to communicate project goals and results have become indispensable and institutionalized tools in the organizational field of humanitarian and development aid. In this context, organizations have become intermediaries and translators between ‘climate risk’ scientists and ‘at risk’ people, thus, facilitating environmental communication. The results show that questions of trust and ownership of ideas play an important role in the context of livelihood related projects linked to climate change adaptation. In this context, not only does the style and content of communication, but also the relationship between the parties who communicate, have an impact upon the success or failure of managing options in climate change adaptation
The environmental and socio-political stakes of counting users within protected natural areas: an interdisciplinary study using interval photography
No full textThis article offers a reflexive presentation of an interdisciplinary case study involving environmental sociology and marine biology. The creation of the Calanques National Park (April 2012), next to Marseille, the second largest city in France, has fuelled debate over the increasing impact of widespread leisure activities on the conservation of biodiversity. Given this, our research programme has developed visual interdisciplinary methods and critically analysed the notion of overuse. This paper presents a case study of Sormiou Bay, a natural anchorage site whose seabed is covered in a meadow of protected seagrass, Posidonia oceanica. Our research involved qualitative and quantitative field surveys and interval photography over a 19-month period, as well as the use of historical aerial photographs. Three main findings are presented here. First, our analysis reveals that a gap exists between actual and perceived levels of use, and this is exacerbated by a scale effect. Secondly, we point out the social and cultural factors, as well as the political context underpinning users’ discourse regarding (over)use of the Calanques. Lastly, we underscore the gap between the environmental awareness of boaters, their actual behaviour and their impact on Posidonia oceanica meadows
Framing transition in China's High-Tech Zones: Advances in Visual Grounded Theory
Get PDFThe article illustrates an ongoing research on the perception of the transition landscapes of two high-tech zones in China. Through this research, the authors attempt to broaden the scope of Grounded Theory (GT) to embrace urban and environmental phenomena by employing GT to explore the processes related to these phenomena by using visual data. The value of the research exceeds the ethnographic relevance of the case studies to interrogate what could be called “transitions’ framing strategies,” in which seeing and the visual – considered in an ecological perspective – couple with attitudes and the senses, thus generating and mediating different kinds of knowledge(s). In particular, the paper compares Visual and non-visual GT and discusses the practical differences among them
Design and Effect of Viral Videos for Social Change
No full textThe use of rich media content in Internet, and social media, has created multiple opportunities for low-investment campaigns for social change. This article analyzes the influence of web-based, visually rich viral videos on people’s social awareness of complex global issues, and their impact in attitudes and behaviors relating to these issues. This study consists of a rhetorical appeal analysis, online views analysis, and expert interviews. Even though these visually rich videos seem to boost the social impact of information, evidence of actual attitudes and social behavior change is unclear.