Carolina Cambre

I am Associate Professor (Sociology of Education) at Concordia University, Montreal in Quebec, Canada. My work explores vernacular visual expression asking: How do people produce and direct the visual space. How is the image a doing? What are the social and cultural work/ings of images.
Generally, my research situates itself at the crossroads of pedagogy & policy, visual sociology, and qualitative methods. More specifically, two recurrent topics have been central to my work over the years: the social and cultural work of images (especially pedagogically and politically), and questions of the limits of available methodological approaches. Through interdisciplinary approaches, I have explored a range of topics from visual processes of social legitimation to digital identity formation through images. In all cases my emphasis is always to produce work that strikes a balance between being empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated. If I were to sum up my past, present and future research in one word, it would be “representation,” that is, my overall concern is to critically investigate representation.
My interests range from critical policy analysis, sociology of information, image studies, to the politics of representation. I have ongoing projects in Argentina and Canada on visual processes of legitimation, representation of online sharing, selfies and the politics of identity, and polymedia literacies.