Rieger Award: Past Winners

Anita’s thesis, Participating in Radical Visual Sociology: Supporting housing activism through gentrification and displacement research examines the processes involved when a participatory arts and research project which investigates the impact of gentrification-induced displacement is instrumentalised for anti-gentrification struggles – and the ethical, methodological and aesthetic decisions this involves.

The field of practice for Sarah Jones’ innovative research is urban wayfinding design. This contributes new insights to visual social practice. Site-specific to the Sydney city centre, Sarah’s research focuses on the pedestrian experience in the public built environment, leaving out all the private spaces, traffic signs, and systems. Urban wayfinding design has been a field primarily focused on a problem-solving process; however, Sarah’s practice-based research puts forward an alternative in the form of a storytelling-based approach.

Joshua Garland’s research project, Framing Nature: Image Construction, Diffusion and Reception within the Environmental and Climate Movement involved a visual content analysis of environmental and climate movement imagery. This project explored the possible avenues through which a visual re-imagining and framing of human-Nature relations may extend beyond a mutually destructive relationship to one where interwoven agencies are realised within the non-human.

In “Coloring outside the lines? Imaginary reconstitution of security in Yemen through image transformations”, Yelyzaveta Glybchenko develops the novel methodology of “imaginary reconstitution of security” during-/post-war communities through transformations of photographic peace images. Her methodology is a unique case of using digital visual image transformations for building moving security/peace constellations, which can express negotiated malleable demos of peace arrangements. This way, the methodology of “imaginary reconstitution of security” is a new possibility to make the processes of designing and implementing peace agreements more democratic through digital visual deliberation and critical local empowerment.

Tricia Ong’s design of a novel visual methodology: the Clay Embodiment Research Method (CERM) was inspired by critical ethnography and Participatory Action Research. The CERM is a mixed method approach comprised of 1) active participant observation, 2) a series of seven participatory clay body mapping workshops and 3) a group interview using photoethnography.

Paola Tine’s artbook She Fell and Became a Horse: An Experiment in Ethnofiction is an experiment in interpretative ethnography through ethnofictional means of representation. Through painting, drawing, and text, and with the accompaniment of local music, it explores the existential journey of three Nepali women as they fight against domestic hierarchies and gendered politics in the context of their daily lives. By building on their real-life stories collected through long-term data collection, Tine proceeds to paint and tell other tales that originate from insights emerged from our ethnographic encounter. She focuses here on conflictual domestic relationships and on the ways these lead to the construction of an idealised past and a dreaded – as much as sought – future.

Julie Patarin-Jossec’s work tests the boundaries of experimental practice and questions disciplinary presuppositions related to the use of photography in sociological research. Julie’s ethnographic portraits result from a long-term ethnography with astronauts, the composition and subject of each photograph is influenced by the immersion of the ethnographer and an additional life story interview with the pictured astronauts.

Tess Baxter’s practice-based doctorate, ‘Falling between Worlds’ demonstrates how text and visuals can be combined to inform research. Her work has diverse forms of expression; a written dissertation that contains visuals, and a practice of video art that contains text (Baxter and Canucci, 2020). Her research area is creative communities in online spaces, specifically the virtual world of Second Life.

Camilo’s work provides a thoughtful, engaged and sophisticated explication of method, perspective and the pragmatics of photographic ethnography. The committee thought that Camilo surpassed the normal limitations and expectations for a dissertation by examining—in exquisite detail—the multiple contexts in which people’s “stories” are created and recreated, viewed, listened to and understood by the researcher/photographer, the participants, the community, and the larger world.

Mennatullah’s study on ‘Visual Communication of Cairo’s street billboards’ contributes to actor-network theory, the field of urban planning practice, and the theory and practice of visual methodologies. Her project also develops participatory approaches and visual representation and analysis, and enhances our understanding of Egyptian culture and social life as well as the application of visual imagery to critical inquiry.