This website contains a number of public resources as well as our members resources. IVSA members can submit content to the site from the members area.

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Visible Voices Changing Lives

Visible Voices Changing Lives

This film tells the story of the origins of Visible Voice as a small project working with remote village communities in Kyrgyzstan Central Asia. The film provides an insight into life in two remote communities in Kyrgyzstan and includes extracts from films made by villagers.

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Making the unfamiliar personal: Arts-based ethnographies as public engaged ethnographies

Making the unfamiliar personal: Arts-based ethnographies as public engaged ethnographies

I present the installation Geographies of the Imagination, an arts-based ethnography about long-term exile, as a form of public ethnography that unveils the acquisition and transmission of ethnographic knowledge as interactive, emergent, and creative.

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Visual Methods at the Crossroads

Visual Methods at the Crossroads

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.

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Conscious Sports Fan

Conscious Sports Fan

ERIC SENCINDIVER With an emphasis on versatility, this collection of t-shirts has been designed to be All-purpose for any and every sports fan. Today’s sports fan is an interesting character as they relate to today’s globally connected world. Fans create alliances with certain sports clubs/teams for a wide variety of reasons.

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News/updates

IVSA Conference 2023: Call For Papers

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IVSA CONFERENCE 2023, June 27-29, 2023, Nairobi, Kenya

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: January 9, 2023

International Visual Sociology Association: Conference 2023

SEEING BEYOND DUALISMS: VISUAL SOCIOLOGY IN LOCAL AND GLOBAL CONTEXTS

The 2023 International Visual Sociology Association Annual Conference invites abstracts for papers, films, photo essays, posters and workshops that promise to engage meaningful dialogue about the current status of visual sociology. As we excitedly return to an in-person conference, we invite submissions that consider places/spaces, considering visual sociology in local and global contexts through an open exchange of scholarship and creative works. IVSA continues to encourage papers, films, photo essays, posters and workshops that examine society and culture from various disciplines and perspectives, and we welcome abstracts that address topics relating to visual theories and methods. Proposals need not specifically address the theme of the conference.

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IVSA Annual Conference 2023: Nairobi, Kenya

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After three years of convening solely online, the 2023 IVSA meeting will be hosted by Multimedia University of Kenya (MMU) in Nairobi from 27-29 June. The institution began in 1948 as a telecommunication hub for the East Africa Common Services and was chartered as a public university in 2013. Situated on a serene 76 hectares in the historic Karen area of Nairobi, the main campus is adjacent to Nairobi National Park and home to a colony of baboons, mischievous monkeys, and many grazing warthogs who would love to see you there next June!

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

    Bertolt Brecht

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

    Bertolt Brecht

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

    Lisa Kristine

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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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    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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

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

    James Reston

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

    Pierre Bourdieu

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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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    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

  • 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

  • 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

Showcase

#Visualsociology

Katy Wareham Morris

Written on

RT @sociologyworc: ‘Parts of town are just destroyed’: the ghost shops of Kent in pictures #VisualSociology theguardian.com/artanddesign/2…

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