Molly Merryman

 
Molly Merryman
IVSA Board Member

I am the founding director of Kent State University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and an associate professor of Sociology. My scholarly and professional work focuses on marginalized voices and inequalities, and because of this I have found that documentary video provides the most meaningful methodological approach for me to use.

My research is qualitative, drawing from ethnography, oral history and documentary filmmaking methodologies and techniques. While my specific topics vary, my guiding concern is utilizing these methods and my power as an institutionally-housed scholar to give voice to marginalized people. Primarily, I share my work in the form of scholarly video documentaries. My documentaries have screened internationally, been broadcast on PBS, and are made available to research participants to further their own causes. I am deeply committed to social change, and see visual sociology as a means for improving the lives of others as well as furthering sociological understandings.

In addition to my service on the board of the International Visual Sociology Association, I also serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Video Ethnography the organizing board of the Ethnografilm Festival in Paris, and the advisory board for Sexing the Past (the UK national LGBTQ history education initiative).

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  • 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

  • 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

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

    James Reston

  • 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

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    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

  • 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

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

    Lisa Kristine

  • 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

  • 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

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

    Bertolt Brecht

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

    Pierre Bourdieu

  • 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

  • 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

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

    William S. Burroughs

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    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

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    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

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

    Nicholas Mirzoeff

  • 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

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

    Steve Harp

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