The International Visual Sociology Association stands in solidarity with Black and racialized communities in demanding justice and the eradication of the systems of oppression and violence that have inflicted incalculable harm on communities of color in the USA. We stand in opposition to heads of state like U.S. President Donald Trump, who has proven himself to be a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, and violent oppressor. We further decry all systems, institutions, and organizations borne of white supremacy, which continue to perpetuate the violence of White Racism in the USA and beyond.
IVSA is committed to open and free intellectual discourse surrounding the visual representation of society and culture
The International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) is a nonprofit, democratic, and academically -oriented professional organization devoted to the visual study of society, culture, and social relationships. Our members represent a wide spectrum of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, education, visual communication, photography, filmmaking, art, and journalism. On this site you can become a member of the IVSA, view some of our members work or find out more about our annual conference.
Find out more
Each year IVSA members gather in a different global location to share their work in visual sociology, visual studies, visual ethnography, documentary film and photography, public art, arts-based research, and visual literacy and education.
The International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) is a nonprofit, democratic, and academically -oriented professional organization devoted to the visual study of society, culture, and social relationships.
IVSA membership is open to any person regardless of occupation, citizenship, or residence. The organizational membership represents a wide spectrum of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, education, visual communication, photography, art, journalism, and related fields.
IVSA members are leaders and innovators in art, photography, filmmaking, and image-based research. Check out our member showcase to see examples of our work.
Visual Studies is the official journal of the International Visual Sociology Association. As a major international, peer-reviewed journal, Visual Studies presents visually-oriented articles across a range of disciplines.
IVSA administer both the Rieger Award Program for outstanding work by graduate students in visual sociology and the Prosser Award Program for outstanding work by beginning scholars in visual methodologies.
Updates and news about the IVSA and its membership
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The IVSA is pleased to announce a new awards program for outstanding work in advancing Anticolonial & Antiracist (ACAR) goals and principles. The new program will offer two related awards: one for progressive advocacy and visual research (PAVR) and one for visual activism (VA). The ACAR awards are in addition to existing Rieger and Prosser award programs that are also administered by the IVSA.
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Workshops have always been a key feature of IVSA conferences and our upcoming online conference will be no exception!
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 am a professor at the Universidad Loyola Andalucía, in Seville where I teach courses in Anthropology of Communication, Cultural Anthropology, and Migration.
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’m a Visiting Research Fellow within the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths, University of London, Education Director of the Urban Photographers Association, Organiser of the International Urban Photography Summer School and the Competition Organiser for UrbanPhotoFest…
I am Associate Professor (Sociology of Education) at Concordia University, Montreal in Quebec, Canada. My work explores vernacular visual expression asking: How do people produce and direct the visual space. How is the image a doing? What are the social and cultural work/ings of images.
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’.
Although I am probably much better known as a Sociologist who studies Urban Neighborhoods and much more likely to define myself as an Activist or Public Scholar, almost all of my work has been “visual” in one way or another.
I work as a Senior Lecturer at the School of Media, University of Brighton, UK. I teach on the Media Studies, Film and Screen Studies, and, Digital Media, Culture and Society programmes.
I am the director of the Social Science Research Center and a professor in the department of sociology at DePaul University where I teach courses on substance use and abuse, underground economies, street gangs…
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 have a PhD in visual and filmic sociology and I teach at Evry university in France in connection with my dual practice as a filmmaker and sociology researcher.
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 am a lens-based artist, educator, and scholar whose work explores the relations between the perceptual and the social. My current research is grounded in a belief that the social is inherently political and that visual studies provides distinct opportunities to engage and understand the affective nature of being with difference.
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.
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).
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
The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.
Pierre Bourdieu
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
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
If it’s far away, it’s news, but if it’s close at home, it’s sociology.
James Reston
Visual culture is now the study of how to understand change in a world too enormous to see but vital to imagine.
Nicholas Mirzoeff
One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.
Lisa Kristine
Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must change.
Bertolt Brecht
So it is my firm belief, that if you want nowadays, to have a clear and distinct communication of your concepts, you have to use synthetic images, no longer words.
Vilém Flusser
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
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
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
Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.
William S. Burroughs
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
Every photograph promises more than it delivers and delivers more than it intended.
Steve Harp
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
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
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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