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Teaching Urban Documentaries, Part I

Teaching Urban Documentaries, Part I

This is the first of a two-part, auto-ethnography about teaching and learning with documentaries. Given the increasing substitution of video screens for flesh and blood professors it is critical to think about both the contexts as well as the contents of these pedagogic practices.

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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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Scratching the Surface: A Rapid Research Appraisal of Graffiti in Manchester

Scratching the Surface: A Rapid Research Appraisal of Graffiti in Manchester

Graffiti artists at Eurocultured 2007 in Manchester talk about the origins, inspirations and motivations for their work. (First shown at the International Visual Sociology Association Conference, New York University, July 2007.)

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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 ELECTIONS

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The IVSA is governed by its Executive Board, which consists of President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Technology Advisor, Visual Studies Editor, Graduate Student Representative, and nine elected Board Members. The Editor, Technology Advisor, and Graduate Student Representative are nominated by the President and ratified by the Executive Board.

The following IVSA Executive Board positions are up for election:

  • 3 Board members, regular term (3 years)
  • 1 board member, short-term, immediate start (18 months) to fill position of a recently-resigned board member

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IVSA 2020: Call for Papers

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We are delighted to share the Call for Papers for the IVSA 2020 Annual Conference at UCD in Dublin, Ireland with you. Our theme – Visualising Social Changes: Seen and Unseen – is meant to highlight the reality that our societies are constantly changing from the individual level in our own everyday lives to the planet level effects of human induced climate change. It is also meant to confront those who wish to freeze and reverse social change, returning to a nostalgic populist past in which things were better and people were more like me. It is meant too to challenge ourselves as visual sociologists to address the conceptual and methodological issues that arise from attempting to visually document ever-changing social processes from a particular perspective using static or delimited moving forms such as photographs, video and film.

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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

  • 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

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

    Pierre Bourdieu

  • 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

  • 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

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

    Lisa Kristine

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

    Bertolt Brecht

  • 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

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

    Steve Harp

  • 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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    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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    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

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

    James Reston

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