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Showcase articles

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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Luban

Luban

The film will tell about several search teams currently working in the Leningrad region, whose purpose is to find, identify and further bury the remains of WWII combatants.

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Atlas of Dreams

Atlas of Dreams

I created the installation Atlas of Dreams, a series of artistic maps and audio recordings, to portray the emotional traces left by 145 dreamers when they narrated their memorable dreams in the cities of the Bay Area of San Francisco.

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News/updates

New IVSA Treasurer

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Dear Colleagues,

On behalf of the IVSA Board of Directors, it’s my pleasure and privilege to announce that Wesley Shrum has been ratified into the position of Treasurer!

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IVSA Awards – Call For Nominations

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NOMINATIONS DEADLINE MAY 16, 2022
VISUAL SOCIOLOGY Awards (Rieger)
VISUAL METHODOLOGY Award (Prosser)
ANTI-COLONIAL and ANTI-RACISM Awards (ACAR)

The nomination deadline for the 2022 IVSA Awards Programs is May 16, 2022. This is the last day nominations and supplementary materials will be accepted for all IVSA award programs, including:

RIEGER Awards ($1000): for outstanding work in visual sociology by graduate students
PROSSER Award ($1000): for outstanding work in visual methodologies by beginning scholars
ACAR Awards ($1000): for exceptional work in advancing Anti-Colonial and Anti-Racism goals and principles

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

    Lisa Kristine

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

    Nicholas Mirzoeff

  • 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

  • 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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    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 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

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

    Pierre Bourdieu

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

    Steve Harp

  • 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

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

    Bertolt Brecht

  • 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

  • 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

Showcase

#Visualsociology

Dr Dawn Mannay

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RT @VisualScholars: #IVSA conference #CfP deadline TODAY 16th May 2022 visualsociology.org/?page_id=936 Join this online conference. It will be a…

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