Creating Visual Knowledge Seminar - Programme abstracts

Visual Competence: Learning about how people look

Dick Chalfen (Temple University, Philadelphia and Center on Media and Child Health, Boston)

This paper has been developed in response to the frustrating and regularly asked question: ‘What is visual sociology or visual anthropology?’. My summary answer has been ‘the cultural study of how people look through time and space’. The competency notion comes from ideas of linguistics and communicative competence as well as James Elkin’s writings on the reality of Visual Studies as an academic discipline. ‘Through time and space’ suggests the anthropological attention to cross-cultural studies and to historical change and development. The phrase ‘how people look’ is intentionally ambiguous to include attention to problematic notions of appearance as well as to questions of looking-at-the-world/everyday life, in conjunction with patterns of interpretation etc. In short, this is an umbrella phrase that lets us include previous topics and subjects of study and encourages new work within a conceptually framed territory. This paper provides an overview of these ideas and proposes a way of organising our thinking about the content of the visual social sciences.

Visual Mediation of Critical Illness: An autobiographical account of nearly dying and nearly living

Jon Prosser (Real Life Methods, University of Leeds)

This paper is concerned with the portrayal of the impact of critical illness on the my life. An autobiographical approach is used to illustrate how imagery mediates personal trauma. A personal journey over a five-year period, from the onset of illness towards recovery, is portrayed in the form of snapshots of critical events. Running parallel to the visual dimension is the application of mountain climbing as a metaphor for first understanding critical illness and then as a vehicle to aid recuperation. The journey is described in a narrative style that represents one reality.

Excavating the Unstated: Bourdieu, habitus, photography and visual methods

Paul Sweetman (University of Southampton)

In this paper I intend, first, to explore some general issues around the use of visual methods, concentrating particularly on what we mean by visual methods and on their usefulness and limitations. I will then move on to focus more specifically on habitus, and how this concept might be visualised. Pierre Bourdieu's understanding of habitus – as a set of embodied predispositions that constitute our overall orientation to or 'way of being' in the world – is increasingly influential but also frequently regarded as somewhat 'slippery': as intangible and difficult to properly operationalise. In the second part of the talk I will look at Bourdieu's own use of photographs as a form of fieldnotes (and what Bourdieu has to say about photography in work such as Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (1990)), before going on to consider how visual methods might help us to explore people's habitus. Moving beyond Bourdieu's own work in this area, I will argue that visual methods can play a very helpful part in addressing ways of being, acting and operating in the social environment that Bourdieu himself suggests are 'beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit’ (Bourdieu 1977: 94). This also means that visual methods can be potentially transformative, allowing for the development of forms of critical self-awareness amongst research participants of the sort that Bourdieu and others attribute to 'socioanalysis' (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992).

Visual Knowledge and the Disciplines

Janet Wolff (CIDRA, University of Manchester)

Questions of visual knowledge have emerged in recent years in a number of disciplines – sociology, art history, visual studies, anthropology. In opening up this session for discussion, to conclude the seminar, I will review their distinct but complementary methods and concerns. The vocabulary of ‘visual culture’, ‘visual studies’ and ‘visual knowledge’ is often employed rather vaguely, sometimes obscuring what are crucial questions. (For example, by ‘visual knowledge’ do we mean knowledge of the visual – the study of art and other images in social life – or knowledge through/by the visual – documentary photography, ethnographic film? Perhaps both – or perhaps they are closely linked – but in any case a matter for clarification.) Although sociologists and other social scientists may not always employ the most sophisticated strategies of visual analysis (compared with art historians, media scholars and others in the humanities), it is important to insist on a sociological grounding for any proposed interpretation; otherwise the risk is a kind of ‘wild’ interpretation which, however ingenious, can be less than convincing if the task of visual knowledge is to understand the social world.

To conclude, I want to point to two increasingly visible (audible?) tendencies in studies of the visual. The first is the rapid growth of studies of the role of the other senses (especially touch and sound, but also smell) in relation to what is seen. The second (in a rather different discourse) is an apparent (re)turn to animism in discussions of the ‘power of images’.