IVSA Conference 2020

38TH ANNUAL
IVSA CONFERENCE

IVSA 2020 Annual Conference

Dublin, Ireland from 6-9 July 2020
Register now

Ní dhéanfaidh smaoineamh an treabhadh duit.

Visualizing Social Changes: Seen and Unseen

UCD School of Sociology looks forward to welcoming you to Dublin on 6-9 July 2020 for the IVSA Conference 2020 on the theme of “Visualizing Social Changes: Seen and Unseen”.

The conference will be hosted in UCD, Dublin. It will begin with an event on the evening of Monday 6 July and end on the afternoon of Thursday 9 July 2020.

As is traditional at IVSA Conferences, we welcome presentations with a visual bent on the theme of “Visualizing Social Changes: Seen and Unseen”. A combination of visual sociology and social change provides a broad and welcoming theme. Visual sociologists have developed a specialty in visually chronicling and examining significant social changes, such as visual studies of deinidustrialization and rural decline and ethnic transitions in local neighbourhoods. While many social changes are physically, materially or socially visible and seen, others remain invisible and unseen, like changes in people’s values and beliefs, for example people becoming more liberal and progressive or more illiberal and populist. Of course, even values and beliefs can be manifest, for example, symbolically in slogans and posters, socially in protests and marches, and organizationally in social movements, civil society groups and political parties. The theme of the conference is meant to encompass the variety of ways to visualize social change, seen and unseen, while also posing a response to the challenge of social changes that have emerged in societies in recent times.

Abstract Submission Deadline Extended: Monday 6 January 2020
Early Bird Registration: Monday 9 March 2020 (early bird price on UCD accommodation)
Normal Registration: Monday 6 April 2020 (all presenters must register by this date to be included in the programme)

Contemporary Ireland has been a crucible of social changes, experiencing a Celtic Tiger boom, austerity and recovery, while also undergoing a profound socio-cultural liberalisation from a traditional, Catholic to a secular, liberal, and progressive society, with immigrants from 200 nationalities composing over 1 in 9 of the population in 2016. Progressive and (unfortunately) regressive social changes are also very current in other countries and regions around the world from Europe, the USA and China to name a few. Visual sociology as a field, and many visual sociologists, have developed a specialty in visually chronicling and examining significant social changes. This includes visual studies of deinidustrialisation and rural decline and ethnic transitions in local neighbourhoods (by a generation of founding visual sociologists such as Doug Harper, John Grady and Jerry Krase to name but three).
IVSA 2019

Many social changes are physically, materially or socially visible and seen, such as new buildings, the latest iPhone or immigrants. Others remain invisible and unseen, like changes in people’s values and beliefs, for example, people becoming more liberal and progressive as in Ireland, and more illiberal and populist in many European countries and the USA. Of course even values and beliefs can be made manifest, for example, symbolically through slogans and posters, socially in protests and marches, and organisationally in social movements, civil society groups and political parties. The theme of the proposed conference is meant to encompass the variety of ways to visualise social change, seen and unseen, while also posing a response to the challenge of regressive social changes that have emerged in too many societies in recent times.

CONFERENCE PLANNING ADVISORY

Dublin is a lively, cosmopolitan city which can also be expensive, particularly for tourist accommodation. We strongly advise that prospective conference participants and attendees plan their trip to Ireland well in advance of the conference including flights and accommodation.

Travel Grants

A limited number of travel grants will be available to presenters whose abstracts submitted by the 16 December 2019 deadline are accepted for presentation at the conference, and who register for the conference between the opening of registration on 10 January 2020 and the deadline for submission of travel grant applications on 24 January 2020.

More Details

ACCOMMODATION

At UCD there will be a limited number of rooms available at a cost of €75 per person per night early bird (deadline: Monday 9 March 2020) or €100 normal (deadline: Monday 6 April 2020). There are many accommodation options in Dublin, some suggestions are available in the UCD International Visitors’ Guide (see link below), but further details will be provided here soon.

UCD International Visitors’ Guide  Visit Dublin  Book UCD Accommodation

Registration

Registration for the conference is now open!. Note: you have to be a member of the IVSA to register.

Register today

If you have questions related to the conference, please contact Gerard Boucher & Iarfhlaith Watson, Conference Co-Directors, at ivsadublin2020@gmail.com.

We look forward to welcoming you to the IVSA 2020 Conference at UCD in Dublin, Ireland and hope that you will enjoy yourself – but not too much!

Mura mbeadh agat ach pocán gabhair bí i lár an aonaigh leis.

The IVSA 2020 Dublin Conference is supported by conference registration fees, the IVSA Board, and a contribution from Fáilte Ireland.

 

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  • 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

  • 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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    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

  • 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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    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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    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

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

    Lisa Kristine

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

    Steve Harp

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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

  • 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

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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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    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

  • 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

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

    Bertolt Brecht

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