IVSA Conference 2020

38TH ANNUAL
IVSA CONFERENCE

IVSA 2020 Annual Conference

Dublin, Ireland from 6-9 July 2020

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. Dublin is a very popular venue, so we advise early booking to be able to attend the conference and to find accommodation.

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.

The abstract submissions and registration will be opening later in the year, keep checking back for more details. If you are already an IVSA member then we will also be emailing to let you know when we open abstracts.

See you in Dublin!

  • 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

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

    Bertolt Brecht

  • 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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    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

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

    Lisa Kristine

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

    William S. Burroughs

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

    Nicholas Mirzoeff

  • 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

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

    Steve Harp

  • 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

  • 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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