Laura Krystal Porterfield, Ph.D. is an urban educator, visualist, and youth culture scholar. Having grown up in El Paso, Texas, Laura is the daughter of two Mississippi transplants who instilled in her the value and promise of higher education.

I’m a professor at Louisiana State University, a sociologist of science and technology with a primary focus on new communications media and social networks. In 1994, I began my research in Kenya, Ghana, and India where I’ve worked and filmed every summer since then, most recently in the urban slums.

I am an associate professor of Sociology and the coordinator of the LGBT Studies program at Kent State University. I primarily teach in the Master’s program in Criminology & Criminal Justice, where my focus is in Victimology and diversity.

I am Convenor of the Visual Methods Group and Chair of the Forensic Psychology Research Group at Middlesex University, London. I have a background in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis and a PhD in Social Psychology.

I am an associate professor of sociology at Ajou University, Suwon, South Korea. My teaching interests include visual sociology, qualitative methods, and sociology of film and media. I have conducted research and written on the themes of film archives, ethics of photographic representation, post/colonial visual culture, and mobilities. My most recent book is Cine-Mobility: Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022).

Greg Scott is a visual sociologist, multimedia artist, and filmmaker at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. He is the founding director of Sawbuck Productions, Inc., a non-profit organization that produces observational documentary films, experimental art films, virtual reality experiences, and large-scale public installation art. He is a co-founder of WILD AMERICAN DOGS, an interdisciplinary art duo focused on producing experimental films and performance, and of the Archive of Midwestern Culture, an institutionally recognized scholarly organization that documents creative life and artistic practice among people living in economically impoverished areas of the rural American Midwest.

I discovered visual sociology at a conference in New York City in 2007 and have been a proud member of the IVSA since this time. I am an associate professor of sociology at the University of Alberta’s liberal arts and science campus, Augustana, which is located in central Alberta, Canada. I teach courses in social theory, visual sociology, sociology of community, media and contemporary culture. I am the editor for ‘Elicitations’, the reviews section of the journal ‘Imaginations: Cross-Cultural Image Studies’.

I undertake an interdisciplinary practice in academic research and the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) sector, specialising in visual sociology, contemporary art, museology, epistemology, and public history.

In taking images, freezing moments, visual methods, as photography, allows us to discover how rich reality truly is. I discovered visual methods at the end of my undergraduate career, through an opportunity to conduct disaster research, and documenting disparities in storm water infrastructure across underprivileged communities…

I’m associate professor at the University of Evry Paris-Saclay (France), in charge of the Visual and Filmic research focus of the sociological research laboratory (Centre Pierre Naville).

I am a researcher and university lecturer. I hold a PhD in visual sociology from the Center for Art History and Theory at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (EHESS), a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Paris 8 and Master’s degree in teaching English as a Foreign Language (ToEFL).

I work as a Lecturer in Digital Media Practice at the Sociology department, Lancaster University, UK. I am passionate about all things visual, and especially interested in media practices that involve people interacting with/through images.