Visualities Research Group

“Method... is not the servant of theory: method actually grounds theory. To speak/write depict the world as a coherent form is to formulate the world in line with an active method vision”.

Jenks, Chris (1995) Visual Culture. London: Routledge

Nowadays, coherent visual methods are a disciplinary need for researchers of the visual. They need to use reflexively aware methods when investigating visual phenomena. This is true for substantive topics such as gender depiction in protest posters of the 1960s. But it is also the case for topics that are part of a larger phenomenon, such as racial segregation in the Middle East.

Visual Studies and Visual Sociology within the Social Sciences are major interest areas. They have gained increasing prominence. These studies have a common approach to visual methods. It is largely non-prescriptive. It encourages diversity, invention, new technology, ‘engagement’ with, and involvement by subjects. It is ‘non-disciplinary’ in its true sense.

The photograph is often still central as a medium of capture and presentation. In the digital age, it is free from its celluloid and paper-based restrictions, cost and technical knowledge for capture.

Physical objects of the visual and their tactility are increasingly used. The internet web-based digital and computer phenomena are continually ahead of developing visual methodologies.

Good textbooks exist on visual methodology. But they are continually restricted by the characteristic described above. Visual research is expanding in scope. It is developing methodologies to help our understanding and analysis.

Many of us engage with issues of art and aesthetics as part of our portfolio of research interests. We have a specific focus on everyday and popular cultures. For example, we investigate the use and interpretation of art objects in research. We explore how aesthetic sensibilities (seeing, feeling, sensing) emerge in and through societal, cultural, and (geo)political structures.

Interplay exists between discursive and beyond-discursive analytical framings and visual and material cultures. This interplay is a persistent concern for our group. A focus on art and aesthetics thus provides a common intellectual space to address these concerns. It allows us to seek connections between our disciplinary groupings.

Current Visualities Research Group projects which engage with this theme include:

• the visual and material economies of book covers
• conceptual art and non-representational theory
• the geopolitics of art and public advocacy
• aesthetic disturbance and the demand for human rights
• aesthetics, work, and political economy

We engage with the theoretical dimensions of the visual. We explore several lines of conceptual inquiry.

An important strand of this inquiry raises questions of the status of the visual as a discrete domain of research interest. It arises in large part by Bal’s (2003) complaints of visual essentialism. This important intellectual work examines the intersections of, for example, visual and material cultures, performativity and visualisation, image, and text. It interrogates assumed ontological boundaries and questions the visual as an object of study.

Our research also positions the visual within theories of social change and transformation. We are especially interested in the perceived shift from modernity to postmodernity.

Alongside related notions of a contemporary ‘turn’ to the cultural, linguistic, ethical, and emotional relations of socio-political life, the ‘visual turn’ creates opportunities for conceptual innovation, and the reconfiguration of theoretical and epistemological landscapes.

Research and publications in this area include:

• work on the transformation of work and labour
• the intersectionalities of law and culture
• science, the supernatural and transgressive displacement

These kinds of theoretical explorations make good and critical use of a variety of ‘theorists of the visual’, such as Barthes, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Foucault, and Goffman. They also encourage different orientations towards and alternative readings of the social scientific canon.

Bal, Mieke (2003). Visual essentialism and the object of visual culture’, Journal of Visual Culture. 2(1): 5-32

We are exploring questions about the ethics of images. We investigate implications for the audience of a particular research project, and for the researchers themselves.

For example, the relationship between the visual and the ethical can complicate assumptions about using images to exemplify and disseminate research analysis and conclusions. It is an invitation to focus on the dynamics of showing, seeing, and looking in specific contexts.

Some of our work contributes to debates about the benefits and problems of showing and seeing specific images which go beyond the mere function of illustration. It points towards their pedagogical, political, or ‘consciousness-raising’ advantages and disadvantages.

We are disturbing the expectation that production, collection, or display of images allow understanding, or at least act as the starting point of dialogue of the issues at stake. Such disruption allows for a productive exploration of issues defined and produced by their same visibility: for example, the visibility of ‘race’, beauty, or the body.

Thus, this line of work deals with the ambivalence of making use of the visible to ‘understand’. It acknowledges the need to denounce that same visibility as core to the production of particular forms and dynamics of social exclusion and inclusion.

We readily accept the idea that visual images convey a wealth of meaning in ‘ocularcentric’ cultures. This includes growing numbers of writers throughout the social sciences.

To speak about ‘visual cultures’ is to speak about different sorts of visual technologies. Such technology includes photography, film, and television. It also includes the sorts of images they show us. This shared interest in the visual unites several members of our group, whose substantive interests fall under a variety of thematic sub-headings. These include media representation, including “new” and social media, visual politics/geopolitics, public narratives, film, photography, and popular culture.

Current Visualities Research Group projects which engage with these themes include work on:

• Western media representations of both Asia and Africa
• video games
• children’s literature
• climate change communication

We work with visual materials and generate research data through visual methodologies. An important benefit of this is how we can use these to bring in voices, perspectives, and ideas from groups who may be put off by or struggle to communicate their thoughts via traditional word or text-based approaches.

For example, some of the projects within the research group use visual techniques such as photography, storytelling, and digital representations. They tap into the creative expressions of children and disabled young people. These techniques enable a broader range of people to be part of the research process. They also provide new channels and materials for communicating such perspectives in non-academic public environments such as schools, museums, and art galleries.

The visualisation of our research outputs presents new challenges for the social sciences. It creates a range of opportunities for developing a rich portfolio of dissemination practices.