IVSA President
Susan Hansen
I am Co-Chair of the Visual and Arts-based Methods Group at Middlesex University, London. I’m also a former Editor of the IVSA’s flagship journal, Visual Studies; founding Editor of Nuart Journal; Co-editor (with Jeffrey Ian Ross and Konstantinos Avramidis) of the Routledge Series on Advances in Graffiti and Street Art Research; and Co-editor (with Julie Patarin-Jossec and Kate Korroch) of the forthcoming (2026) Companion to Visual Studies (Routledge).
IVSA Board Member
Hyun Gyung Kim
I am an Assistant Professor at Seoul Women’s University, specializing in feminist cultural studies and visual methodology. My research interests include postcolonial and Cold War regimes and gender, qualitative methodology, and visual material-based methodology, and I have published in both Korean and English on topics such as the cultural politics of women political leaders’ appearance in Korean media, neoliberal postfeminism, and Japanese military sexual slavery and the Cold War.
IVSA Vice President
Han Sang Kim
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).
Social Media and Communications Director
Sylvia Kouveli
Visual multitasker, social media guru, and research-based artist, Sylvia Kouveli is known for feminist work related to gender, illness, and public space intervention. With a background in documentary photography and video, she often adopts visual or sensory methodologies (sound walks, collaging, “River of Life”) for her work.
IVSA Treasurer (Acting)
Greg Scott
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.
Technology Advisor
Marty Miller
Marty Miller is a researcher and visual artist based in Hong Kong. He works with community groups across East Asia to explore how people use new imaging tools to tell stories. His projects support creative expression and shared memory-making, while also inviting people to consider how the tools they use shape what gets shown.
IVSA Board Member
Chinelo L. Njaka, Ph.D.
Chinelo L. Njaka, Ph.D. (she/her/hers) is a sociologist and multidisciplinary artist. She is also the Founder and Director of Peckham Rights!, a non-profit organization based in London, UK. Her research interests center around the critical examination of race, racism, and racialization. Her current research explores the intersection of race and craft practices throughout the Black Atlantic, focusing on quilt-making and visual storywork.
IVSA Board Member
Michael Brown
I am a practice-led researcher, participatory and ethnographic filmmaker, and an academic. I explore ethnographic and participatory practice, engaging with marginalised, disadvantaged or declining people and their cultures, species, places and ecosystems, to promote dialogue in search of positive transformation.
IVSA Board Member
Lynnette Mawhinney
I am a cultural anthropologist and champion for all things urban education. I am a Professor of Urban Education but also wear a hat as a higher education administrator (Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Academic Initiatives) at Rutgers University-Newark in Newark, NJ (United States).
IVSA Board Member
Katalin Halasz
I’ve been an active member of IVSA since 2013 when I curated ‘Visualising Affect’, an international art exhibition in the framework of the IVSA 2013 Conference that was held at Goldsmiths, University of London.
IVSA Board Member-at-large
Julie Patarin Jossec
Julie joined the IVSA’s flagship journal (Visual Studies) as a co-editor in 2020, and joined the IVSA Board in 2022. She is currently a Board member-at-large and serves as the acting exhibition Curator. A sociologist by education and an independent photographer, Julie’s work is at the intersection of audiovisual practice, queer theory, and environmental studies. She’s especially interested in curation and performance as ethnographic methods.
IVSA Board Member-at-large
Sabina Andron
Dr Sabina Andron is an interdisciplinary urban scholar working on the visual cultures of cities. Her work describes the material, semiotic, and legal qualities of public images such as graffiti and advertising, to understand their role in urban experiences.
IVSA Board Member
Paola Tiné
Originally from Italy, I am an anthropologist and painter based in South Australia. Over the last years, I have conducted fieldwork in Australia and Nepal, using experimental visual methodologies, particularly drawing and painting. As an artist and researcher, my aim is to translate social interactions, constructions and paradoxes within a decoding and encoding visual language. I see the canvas as an ‘heterotopia’, using a term by Foucault, another world within this world, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside; a space of experimentation in which the constructed mechanisms of social life are revealed.
IVSA Board Member
Laura Porterfield
Over the past 15 or so years, I’ve been fixated on sight and seeing, its relationship with emotions, and what we learn from the convergence of both seeing and feeling. Drawing from critical Black sociology, from the pioneering intensive community studies and theoretical contributions of W.E.B. Dubois, to the feminist sociological imaginings of Patricia Hill Collins, and other black studies scholars like Tina Campt, Deborah Willis, bell hooks, and Nicole Fleetwood, I have been working to contribute to the field by bringing together the worlds of education, visual studies, and critical black sociology.
Graduate Student Representative
Laura Magnusson
I am an interdisciplinary artist based in Montreal, working across sculpture, installation, video, performance, drawing, and archival media. My practice explores how trauma from sexual violence can be expressed through visual, material, and embodied approaches, expanding testimony beyond word-based means. I am attentive to how systems meant to provide care or justice can reinforce harm, prioritizing procedural norms while overlooking the nuanced, lived impacts of trauma that rarely find space in official accounts. As a trained scuba diver, I often create work underwater, engaging water’s immersive, dynamic qualities to unsettle the fixed expectations of institutional reporting and open up new, fluid conditions for expression and witnessing.
IVSA Board Member
Colin Adams
I am from the eastern Caribbean and trained at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Currently, I teach sociology courses at Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield, MA, USA, in my role as an associate professor of sociology. Since being introduced to visual sociology in 2008, I have incorporated it into the research methods module in all my courses. Street photography is my passion, a joyous activity for me is visiting a city’s streets with my camera, hunting for or waiting for the ‘opportune moment’ to photograph.
IVSA Board Member
Vladimir Rizov
I am Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. My teaching and research interests include critical criminology, documentary photography, and the sociology of popular culture with a specific focus on film, literature, and videogames.
