Visual Social Research: Methods and Practices

Interestingly, Sociology arrives as a discipline at roughly the same moment as the visual arts (and photography in particular) gain prominence. In this class, we will develop the intellectual history of visual methods in the social sciences, paying particular attention to the way sociologists and anthropologists have approached fieldwork with their cameras (e.g. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, John Collier Jr., Frank Cancian, Pierre Bourdieu, Douglas Harper, David Schalliol, Camilo Jose Vergara, and more). However, unlike most visual courses of this kind, I will strongly inflect this class with epistemological and theoretical concerns, pulling from a more interdisciplinary group of scholars to study the impact of images on society and on ourselves, from certain strands of geography, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. As such, not only will students leave this course with a means toward completing their own fieldwork project using images (archival, stills, video, etc.), but also the necessary armor to think through the practice of making and consuming images in a society increasingly saturated with them.

Icon Image: “Shooting Back,” Chiapas, Mexico (1971) (c) Frank Cancian, obtained through open access Cancian Archive via ArtStor