Rieger Awards Nominations

Deadline for nominations April 7, 2023

Eligibility and Nominations

To be considered for a Rieger Award, graduate students must be nominated by a current IVSA member and have completed a masters thesis or doctoral dissertation during the preceding two years. Nominees also must have been graduate students when they completed the thesis, dissertation, paper or project for which they have been nominated. Nominees do not have to be IVSA members, but if they are, they can self-nominate.

Rieger Thesis/Dissertation Award

To nominate a graduate student whose outstanding masters thesis or doctoral dissertation was completed during the previous two years, submit the following (in English):

  • Contact information for the nominee and the nominating IVSA member: name, position, academic department or program, institution, telephone and email address.
  • A nomination letter (1000 words max) from the nominating IVSA member, recommending the student’s work in terms of the Awards Program review criteria (see below).
  • Written confirmation from the nominee’s faculty advisor or dissertation chair verifying the date of the thesis or dissertation proposal defense.
  • For Masters Students: A copy of the complete thesis and thesis abstract.
  • For Doctoral Students: A copy of sample chapters (60 pages max) and a dissertation abstract.
  • Doctoral student nominees may be asked to submit their full dissertation at a later date.

Rieger Paper/Project Award

To nominate a graduate student whose outstanding paper or project was completed during the previous two years, submit the following (in English):

  • Contact information for the nominee and the nominating IVSA member: name, position, academic department or program, institution, telephone and email address.
  • A nomination letter (1000 words max) from the nominating IVSA member, recommending the student’s work in terms of the Awards Program review criteria (see below).
  • A digital copy of the nominated paper or project (e.g. PDF or online gallery/resource).
  • NOTE: Paper or project completion must involve submission by the student to a course, presentation at a conference or workshop, publication, or incorporation in a public exhibit.

Review Criteria

Each nominee’s work will be evaluated by the IVSA Awards Review Committee to assess its thoughtfulness, significance and creativity in addressing issues of interest to members of the IVSA. The Review Committee will give special consideration to work that:

  1. enhances the theory and/or practice of visual sociology;
  2. enriches understanding of culture and social life;
  3. contributes new insights to social scientific research and practice; and/or
  4. models creative and effective applications of visual imagery to social research.

Nominations



Only current IVSA members may make nominations for our awards. If you are already a member please log into your account to access the online nomination forms (which will be viewable on this page).

If you are not yet a member of the IVSA, please consider becoming one.

Benefits of membership

  • 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

  • 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

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

    James Reston

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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

  • 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

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

    Nicholas Mirzoeff

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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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    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

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

    Steve Harp

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

    Lisa Kristine

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

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

    Pierre Bourdieu

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