Visual methods are at the crossroads. They can remain in a niche or move into the mainstream by also addressing all people using visual materials. In the social sciences, visual methods encompass photography, video, and graphic representations.
The classroom is remarkably suited to a step by step introduction of visual materials into the curriculum. Properly managed this process can also function as an exhilarating apprenticeship in learning how to make images competently, interpret them responsibly, and display them effectively, resulting in a more robust sociology…
On the first Friday of every month the American Media goes nuts! What they do is as predictable as clock work and just about as insightful. Their exercise in panic wouldn’t be such a big deal except that it tends to freak out Wall Street and unnecessarily confuses the American public.
This exhibit features an extract from an ongoing documentary project aiming to provide an insight into Kyrgyz culture and its influence on everyday life in Kyrgyzstan. The film features an interview with an artist we met during visits to the Issy Kul region of Kyrgyzstan in 2011. Our visit took place a few months after a a short but bloody revolution and subsequent ethnic violence in the South of the country that had a seriously disrupting impact on the Kyrgyz national psyche.
In this book I bring together visual work on urban communities that I had been doing long before I had even heard of Visual Sociology, as well as after my encounters with the International Visual Sociology Association. As John Grady might have phrased it — almost 50 years of doing urban sociology visually.
