Prosser Award: Past Winners

Stella Skiadopoulou’s participatory action research project Nostos, combines participatory filmmaking with affect film theory, aiming at proposing the use of participatory nostalgia re-enactments as methodological tool for social integration of migrants and refugees in Northern Ireland (NI), as well as wider social and political change.

Anna Smirnova’s body-mapping methodology stands as a testament to the creative and effective applications of visual imagery in critical inquiry. Through her body-mapping methodology, Anna demonstrates the power of visual representation to catalyse critical thinking and foster a deeper understanding of complex issues. She used body-mapping storytelling to amplify young people’s voices concerning their problems, fostering self-analysis in peacebuilding and conflict resolution settings. Body-mapping has recently emerged as a powerful participatory arts-based method which has the potential to significantly enhance the theory and practice of visual methodologies.

In his research, Gary aims to develop the methodological and conceptual scope of visual sociology – as part of what he sees as the ‘third wave’ of visual sociology. In doing so, he foregrounds relationality and image studies as well as user practices in relation to the techno-social status of our age. In this regard, his recent (2021) book Visual Sociology: Practices and Politics in Contested Spaces (co-authored with Dennis Zuev) speaks to the interdisciplinarity of the subject and the varied constituency of scholarship and visual practice. To this end, this is not a visual sociologist’s manual or a comprehensive review of visual-based methodologies, rather, Gary’s book is a study of the nascent visual dependencies and visual utility emerging in the contested spaces that images now operate in.

Julia Tulke’s longitudinal Aesthetics of Crisis (AOC) project documents and analyses shifting currents on the walls of Athens. Julia follows Lyman Chaffee’s notion of political street art as a ‘barometer’ by tracing, in real time, newly emerging discourses and events: the austerity referendum and so-called refugee crisis of 2015; the growing visibility of feminist and queer protest and expression since the mid-2010s; dissent with documenta 14; anti-Airbnb and anti-gentrification sentiments; the response to COVID; and, most recently, graffiti removal as the aspirational performance of the end of crisis. Her work demonstrates the value of street art and graffiti as a methodological approach – rather than an object of analysis – able to render visible and sensible gradual changes in a particular urban social, political, and cultural landscape over time.

During the last 10 years Manuel Ortiz has made several trips to Colombia to investigate and document in an audiovisual way processes of forced migration, peace strategies and community resistance. On his most recent trip, Ortiz produced a multimedia work for the human rights organization Global Exchange on the alleged human rights violations of the young people who participated in the National Strike between April and July 2021.

The vertical surfaces of cities are archives of urban identities, and contested terrains of occupation and visibility. They provide a location for numerous signs, markings and inscriptions, whose visual, material and territorial dynamic is under permanent negotiation. Sabina’s thesis takes as its subject this dynamic between urban surfaces and inscriptions, to understand their spatial politics […]

Terence Heng is a prolific visual sociologist whose work engages with the performance of diasporic ethnic identities through place-making. He has documented the rituals and practices of Taoist spirit mediums, or Tang-ki, in suburban spaces in Singapore; as well as exhumations and the social and cultural life of Bukit Brown Cemetery.