IVSA Conference 2024

The 2024 IVSA conference is dedicated to exploring the concept of “visual accountability” or visually mediated practices of regulation and control. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, and accelerating through it, we identified a shift in progress whereby digital images took an increasingly central role in constructing, maintaining and transforming formal and informal processes of adjudicating what counts as true. What kind of images are considered valid, is allowed and accepted as-if true? How do they convince, and get authorized, and become usable?

Will visual accountability be used in the ways accounting itself is used by governments, international organizations and corporations to govern and subjugate vulnerable individuals (See Neu 2006)? How can the less powerful respond and resist? It is worth wondering how digital image sharing contributes to digital infrastructures and impacts practices of enacting certain truths in everyday life. Particular ways of looking that are honed online and emerge out of digital sociality, challenge visual sociology to devise new ways to dialogue with audiences across the academy, bring sociological understandings to the quotidian micro-level, and connect the practice of sociology to broader public issues.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1990) posited that the power of photography is extrinsic to photography itself and gains currency by communicating within a system of values. When these pictures become mobile, together with the apps that allow their creation and circulation, they contribute to what Hjorth and Pink call a “social lubricant” (2014). In 2021, 22-year-old Gabby Petito was reported missing in the USA: Her boyfriend was on the run. Cyber sleuths using Twitter and TikTok began to share information to build a timeline of Petito’s movements, zeroing in on the Instagram photos she had been posting up to the time she disappeared. One user noted her hair had dark roots in one photo and seemed to have been freshly dyed blonde in another; others examined the pictures and triangulated with dates to show this was an error. Lavrence and Cambre (2020) use the term, the “digital forensic gaze,” to describe ways of looking that mobilize veridical techniques when scrutinizing online images, as seen when people and groups mobilize online. In these kinds of contexts, such images are considered dubious until proven otherwise.