IVSA Conference 2021

38TH ANNUAL
IVSA CONFERENCE

IVSA 2021 Annual Conference

Dublin, Ireland from 5-8 July 2021

Following the cancellation of the 2020 annual conference due to the COVID-19 pandemic we can announce that next year’s annual conference will be held in Dublin from July 5-8, 2021. Please mark your calendars and monitor this 2021 conference webpage for more information.

You can read the full cancellation statement here:

Cancellation statement

We will be “rolling over” all of the 2020 abstracts into the 2021 program. This means that if your paper, film, exhibit, or other work was accepted for presentation at the 2020 conference, it is automatically accepted into the 2021 conference program. If you have already withdrawn your paper and would like it reinstated for inclusion in the 2021 program, please contact the Dublin team (ivsadublin2020@gmail.com).

Obviously, not every scholar in the 2020 program will be able to attend next year’s program. If you are unable to attend the 2021 conference, you may withdraw your submission at any time. To account for attrition and to expand and further diversify the attendance at the 2021 conference, we will be holding another call for papers in the autumn. Please stay tuned for more information on how to withdraw a paper and how to submit a new paper for possible inclusion in the 2021 conference.

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  •  

    Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

    William S. Burroughs

  •  

    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

  •  

    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

  • 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

  •  

    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

  •  

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

    James Reston

  • 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

  • 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

  •  

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

    Nicholas Mirzoeff

  •  

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

    Steve Harp

  •  

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

    Lisa Kristine

  •  

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

    Bertolt Brecht

  • 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

  •  

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

    Pierre Bourdieu

Showcase

#Visualsociology

Contact us

 
 
 
Become a member