The first image-text artist book I have ever designed and edited myself is now out in the world. This is another collaboration with publisher Immaterial Books, based in Champaign, Illinois, headed up by my friend Phil Kalantzis-Cope. We were also very lucky to have new Assistant Curator and PR manager Micah McCoy pitch in on the final stages as we went to print with this project. So far, amidst the many things that I have to do in the course of a day and a week, from daily life to my full time job conducting research with the University of Washington, my collaborations with Immaterial Books has been a real joy. What you get with Immaterial Books is collaboration - direct contact and engagement with the curators and authors, and who are willing to discuss the material at hand and how to begin to build community around your vision.

I initiated this project with Julie without knowing her in 2022, but knowing of her work through the journal she helps run - Visual Studies - one of the top reviews for visual scholarship in the social sciences, and one that pioneered the field of visual sociology.

So, what is this book? Thread of Water is many things. It is an image text book. But, it is also a sociological text. Julie and I bonded over our love of imagery and sociology, specifically how ethnography can lend itself to creative expression. Also, over our interest in oceans and coastal spaces and places. But, and perhaps more importantly, we were both very interested in critical theory, in analysis that attempts to step outside our capitalistic mindset, and to also move around the peripheries of the doxa of conventional sociology. To be able to do projects like this. To combine one’s know-how and collaborate with someone on a piece of work that you are excited about, but unsure of - well, I think this is what an important facet of being an intellectual means to me. We use our combined intellectual foundations to approach a new kind of “terrain.”

The Thread of Water is a reflexive wandering in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea. The photographs investigate the colonial politics of the underseas through the eeriness of subaquatic weightlessness and light contrasts: artifacts and bodies are altered, if not disincarnated, in undefined waterscapes that build a narrative of dispossession and perdition. From digital to analog photography, including thermal imagery, the collection curated for this book questions how movement can transcend landscapes to embrace affect. But, more than anything, The Thread of Water is an intimate narrative about trauma and queerness that navigates different forms of storytelling (photographs, drawings, poetry, fieldwork notes) to explore the in-betweens, the coexistent multiplicities, and the pervasiveness of liberatory praxis.

Furthermore, Dr. Julie Patarin-Jossec is extremely accomplished. She is a photographer, a diver, a writer, and by training, a sociologist and ethnographer. Across a number of peer reviewed books, journal articles, as well as public facing articles, her work spans a number of interlocking fields: feminist and Indigenous theory, environmental studies, and visual sociology. Throughout her recent work, she has mobilized ethnography and art-based methods as a means to investigate how colonialism generates politics of bodies and environments––resulting in questions about land access and dispossession, extractivism, degradation, domestication, and exclusion. As such, she continually returns to themes of resistance and agency deployed by human and nonhuman bodies. Empirically, she has investigated these dynamics in the fields of commercial diving, which makes up much of the work we will discuss today around this new release.

Julie is also a teacher, having taught ethnographic methods courses and sociology in Russia and France. She is the founder of several visual methodologies working groups (e.g., International Political Science Association’s “Visual Politics” committee). Also, she is the Co-Editor of the journal Visual Studies, and a Board member of the International Visual Sociology Association. Since 2023, Julie is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Explorers Club.

You can get the book directly from the publisher here: https://www.immaterialbooks.com/store/p/threadofwater

You can also get the book on Barnes and Noble here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-thread-of-water-julie-patarin-jossec/1144919360

I also hosted a virtual panel with Julie, as well as the president of the International Visual Sociology Association Greg Scott, which is available to view at your leisure on the Immaterial Books website and YouTube.

Events so far around this work:

·       Hosted public virtual panel event “Submerged Narratives” and discussion through the publisher, Immaterial Books, on March 18, 2024.

·       Book release event “Queering Images of the Undersea” at Sketchbook Brewing, Chicago, IL, February 18, 2024

Images courtesy of Phillip Kalantzis-Cope.