Visual Studies – Embarking on a New Era

Fellow Visualistas,

I hope this message finds you doing as well as possible in this age of proximity distancing, pervasive uncertainty, and social reorganization. I don’t know about you, but in these emotionally taxing times, I’m particularly happy to be the sender or recipient of comparatively good news (or, to be honest, any news that isn’t about COVID-19).

And so it’s my great pleasure to announce the wonderful and exciting news that our esteemed interdisciplinary journal, Visual Studies, has a whole new editorial team in place!!!!

IVSA 2020 Conference Cancelled

Dear Colleague,

Over the past several weeks, the Executive Board of the IVSA, in collaboration with the conference directors in Dublin, have been monitoring and discussing the ever-changing realities associated with the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the planning of this year’s annual conference.

For the sake of public health and with admittedly heavy hearts, we have decided to cancel this year’s conference.

IVSA ELECTIONS

On behalf of the IVSA, we would like to thank everyone who stood for a position in our recent elections to the IVSA Board. Although not everyone could be successful, we very much appreciate the commitment that members have shown towards the work of the IVSA. We also want to thank all our members who took the time to vote.

IVSA 2020: Call for Papers

We are delighted to share the Call for Papers for the IVSA 2020 Annual Conference at UCD in Dublin, Ireland with you. Our theme – Visualising Social Changes: Seen and Unseen – is meant to highlight the reality that our societies are constantly changing from the individual level in our own everyday lives to the planet level effects of human induced climate change. It is also meant to confront those who wish to freeze and reverse social change, returning to a nostalgic populist past in which things were better and people were more like me. It is meant too to challenge ourselves as visual sociologists to address the conceptual and methodological issues that arise from attempting to visually document ever-changing social processes from a particular perspective using static or delimited moving forms such as photographs, video and film.

Members (Past and Present) Survey

At our annual meeting in June, the executive board resolved to form an Equality and Diversity Committee. All current board members are part of this committee. We feel that it is important to consult all past and current IVSA members to help set the foundations and future direction for this new committee. As a result we are asking all members past and present to complete a short survey.

  •  

    Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

    William S. Burroughs

  • We never really know what’s around the corner when we’re filming – what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.

    Barbara Kopple

  • You try your hardest to give people their space, but at moments you know you’re capturing their image in ways they may or may not be okay with. It’s that rocking back and forth between respect and betrayal that I feel like is at the heart of the film.

    Kirsten Johnson

  • Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology – looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

    George Lucas

  • I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

    Errol Morris

  •  

    The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.

    Pierre Bourdieu

  • Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.

    Henry Rollins

  •  

    If it’s far away, it’s news, but if it’s close at home, it’s sociology.

    James Reston

  •  

    Visual culture is now the study of how to understand change in a world too enormous to see but vital to imagine.

    Nicholas Mirzoeff

  •  

    There are dignified stupidities, and there are heroic stupidities, and there is such a thing as stupid stupidities, and that would be a stupid stupidity not to have a camera on board.

    Werner Herzog

  • So it is my firm belief, that if you want nowadays, to have a clear and distinct communication of your concepts, you have to use synthetic images, no longer words.

    Vilém Flusser

  • If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.

    Salman Rushdie

  • Give us adequate images. We lack adequate images. Our civilization does not have adequate images. And I think a civilization is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it doesn’t develop an adequate language for adequate images.

    Werner Herzog

  •  

    The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.

    Zygmunt Bauman

  •  

    For any picture, ask yourself what question or questions it might be answering. Since the picture could answer many, questions, we can decide what question we are interested in.

    Howard Becker

  •  

    Every photograph promises more than it delivers and delivers more than it intended.

    Steve Harp

  •  

    Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must change.

    Bertolt Brecht

  •  

    One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.

    Lisa Kristine

  • Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that ‘language’ themselves (just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs). Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way

    Howard Becker

Showcase

#Visualsociology

VisualSocialScience

Written on

RT @sociologyworc: Great thread on how these two girls are still friends today but it's the first time they'd seen this image taken 40+ yea…

Contact us

     
     
     
    Become a member