Towards a quantitative visual social science

Starting with two photographs of the Ontario Educational Exhibit of 1876, this article explores the visual culture of colonial Upper Canada's educational environment and landscape as envisioned in photographs, exhibitions and buildings. Their complicity and visceral affect can be interpreted by the experience of movement in space. The significance of combining sight and movement in the historical experience of creating the classified landscapes of education facilitated industrial modernity's production of difference in space, identities, gender and labour, while promoting educational progress of the British Empire in the Atlantic world.     

Coming conferences and call for papers

This paper examines the popularity of lithography in late 19th century China and relates the cultural significance of this new mass medium to the construction of modernity within China's semi‐colonial experience. In contrast to woodblock illustrations, which had been widely circulated in China for more than a millennium, lithography fundamentally changed the way images are understood; they now emphasized and visualized change, the novel and the particular. The paper also analyses some pictures selected from the famous lithographic journal Dianshizhai to demonstrate a prominent realist desire. While Chinese readers desired to comprehend the basic forms and patterns of the new world objectively through these pictures, they also subjectively identified with the acts of seeing portrayed in these lithographs, desiring to see and be seen. I argue that while the oscillation between the desire for objective details and subjective identification gives lithography an extremely rich hermeneutic space, this new form of visual representation also helped stabilize the uncertainty and threat of modernity.     

Grounded in the World: Developmental Origins of the Embodied Mind

Piaget's (1952) question of how the adult mind emerges from the sensorimotor infant is still the framing issue for developmental psychology. Here I suggest that real‐life skill is better understood if the sensorimotor origins of cognition are not abandoned. Skilled people are not only better at both abstract and logical thinking but also at processing the world “online” and, most important, seamlessly and rapidly shifting between the two modes. I illustrate the tight coupling between action, perception, and cognition in early life and propose that this coupling remains but becomes more flexibly adaptive. Further, I show that the language of dynamics is appropriate to capture these mind‐body‐world interconnections.     

Empowering,invasive or a little bit of both? A reflection on the use of visual and narrative methods in research with migrant sex workers in South Africa

Although migration plays a critical role in the economic landscape of the world, government officials and researchers do not sufficiently include migration and/or migrants in research studies and development policies. In South Africa, many migrants – both internal and cross-border – engage in informal livelihood strategies, including sex work (see Richter et al. 2012). Currently, the bulk of research that is being conducted in South Africa in the areas of migration and sex work rely heavily on the use of traditional research approaches and focus mainly on concerns surrounding issues of public health, with increased attention to HIV (for example, see SANAC 2013; Scheibe, Drame and Shannon 2012; Scorgie et al. 2011). While this work is invaluable, there is a need for research that can counter the stigma that sex workers overwhelmingly face in light of HIV/AIDS. Participatory visual and narrative research approaches – as part of mixed method study designs – that examine the lived experiences of migrant sex workers can provide important insights that ‘move beyond the polarized and simplistic arguments that have circulated in South African about migrant sex workers’ (Nyangairi and Palmary, 2014, 132). This methodological approach makes important and necessary contributions to national and international discourses on migration and sex work (see Oliveira and Vearey 2015). In addition, these methods provide a unique platform where the normative discourses that portray migrants as a homogenous vulnerable and apolitical group of people can be contested (Palmary 2006). In this article, I present and discuss three participatory visual and narrative research projects that have been conducted with migrant men, women and transgender persons who sell sex in two Provinces of South Africa and examine the suitability of these approaches.     

Communication problems in the intensive care unit

Hospitalization in an intensive care unit is often physically uncomfortable and socially disorganizing. The ordinary forms of conversational participation that generate and sustain a sense of agency are breached when the patient cannot communicate in socially consensual “real time.” Using my own experience in an intensive care unit, I describe how delayed speech, through the use of an alphabet board, frequently leads to a host of interactional problems and mutual accusations about character. I attempt to show that the fabric of self and the perception of quality of care are achieved through “real time” communication. I also describe the differential communicative structure of those who will not and those who will use my alphabet board. Those using the board exhibit, through board employment and through the “local” topics discussed, a depth of common culture between them and me.     

A question of perception: Bourdieu, art and the postmodern

Bourdieu and Darbel's classic study of European art museum audiences, The Love of Art (1991), remains one of the most influential academic studies of the social indices of art perception. Its findings were central to Bourdieu's on-going study of culture-mediated power relations, as found in the book Distinction (Bourdieu 1984), as well as social surveys of the behaviour of museum audiences across the world. Much in Bourdieu's account of art perception, however, has begun to appear dated and in need of supplementation. This paper will be a critical but sympathetic re-reading of Bourdieu's sociology of art perception in the light of recent criticisms of his approach. Whilst fine art and its institutions continue to function as sources of social identification and differentiation, this paper argues that the relationship between perception and stratification is somewhat looser than connoted in Bourdieu's work. Beyond the shift to a less rigid taxonomy of social formations, the immense expansion of the visual arts complex has opened up possibilities for the dissemination of art knowledge beyond the cultivated bourgeois. The erosion of boundaries between the aesthetic and the economic, between art and popular culture, are the result of processes of commodification that have placed museums alongside shopping malls within the realms of consumption and entertainment. New audiences have emerged from this mix with less dichotomized - that is, either cultivated or popular - ways of seeing culture that suggest a revision of Bourdieu's overly integrated account of class and cognition. An alternative, 'postmodern', approach to art perception is entertained, where an aesthetics of distinction is replaced by a culture of distraction, but this abstracts culture from any structural grounding. Capturing the shift to an accelerated cultural present, instead, requires a warping of Bourdieu's categories to account for broader patterns of culture and economy and the accentuation of modern visual culture.     

The message is the medium: immaterialism and McLuhan’s Poetic Excess

Against interpretations of Marshall McLuhan as philosophical materialist, I argue that Understanding Media and its tagline, the medium is the message, show McLuhan to be an immaterialist: a poetic, intuitive thinker, at least as interested in immaterial as in material aspects of the world. From a pragmatic perspective, or one requiring attention to both poetic and technical modes of understanding, McLuhan’s approach—offering a torrent of flashing insights and neglecting the process of empirically assessing these insights—is described as poetic excess. This is a double-edged sword, alienating many readers even as it inspires others. McLuhan’s poetic excess is a rhetorical reminder of the value and power of poetic thinking, and simultaneously of its insufficiency for the fullest understanding. Pleading that his poetic texts should be read rhetorically rather than literally, I argue we should forgive McLuhan’s worst affronts to technical, materialist rationality. McLuhan’s immaterialist epistemology, inseparable from the content of his insights, is a valuable part of his distinctive and foundational contribution to media studies.     

Visualities of strategic vision: Lookout Mountain Laboratory and the deterrent state from nuclear tests to Vietnam

This article considers two visual cultures of America’s deterrent state in the Cold War, the cinematic and cybernetic, by following the history of the 600th Photographic Squadron of the United States (US) Air Force in Vietnam and its 1950s progenitor, the 1352nd Motion Picture Squadron, or Lookout Mountain Laboratory. We argue that cinematic and cybernetic visual cultures were at the heart of a Cold War visual alliance that was also a Cold War visual contest, and cameras were situated at the centre of the contest. Specifically, the cinematic and the cybernetic represent two distinct visualities of vision, as the Cold War cameras of the Air Force assumed either transcendental or transcendent positions. The former, in keeping with a cinematic visuality, was oriented towards casting America as a sight to see in the context of its war on communism, with cameras operating as a condition of possibility for the construction of the ‘image’, whereas the latter, in keeping with a cybernetic visuality, was oriented towards the American appetite to see, to monitor and survey the world over, with cameras operating as processors of ‘information’. The history of the 600th Photographic Squadron and its progenitor, Lookout Mountain Laboratory, suggests that the transition from cinematic to cybernetic visualities of vision was part of a broader transformation in the US Cold War state from a nuclear deterrent state to a supra-nuclear deterrent state.     

Photographer–camera–place relations: reflections on postphenomenology and landscape photography practice

In the light of a postphenomenological understanding of technological artefacts as mediators of experience in non-neutral (rather than determinist) ways, this study set out to explore ways in which the triad of photographer–camera–place is co-constituted. I examined the relations that emerged in the interaction of these three elements within the context of landscape photography practice. For this purpose, I created three photographic events: I photographed three different places of autobiographical significance with different photographic systems, whose choice was variously inspired by each particular place and my connection to it. Through this reflection on practice, I examine the way in which, in each case, the self–camera–place triad was co-constituted, producing a subjective and context-specific understanding of the mediatory role of the photographic technologies that I used. The results of this reflection have implications for practice in that they postulate an engaged approach to landscape photography based on the co-constitution of self, technology and place rather than the traditional way of looking associated with landscape. It also has theoretical implications in proposing a relational framework, based on this triad, for reading representations of landscape.     

Factors that influence organisational crisis perception from an internal stakeholder’s point of view

This paper starts from the premise that crisis is a perception and that one of the best ways to conquer a crisis is not to allow it to develop in the first place. By detecting or perceiving a crisis before other stakeholders do, an organisation can prevent or mitigate a crisis. Few studies have considered the question of whether organisations put the right people in the right places to be able to see a crisis coming. Within an organisation, managers are usually well placed to take decisions to initiate crisis communication, but they seem to be reluctant to do so or may not wish to see an impending crisis. Communication professionals should have a better perception of a crisis, but they rarely find themselves in a position to have a substantial impact on the management decision to communicate during a crisis. In this paper, we study crisis perception by individuals in a large governmental organisation during various stages of an unfolding crisis and compared perception scores to individual profiles based on study background, professional situation and crisis experience. This study involves a large-scale scenario-driven survey with ‘crisis perception’ as the main dependent variable. The results of this specific case indicate that an academic communication degree, a high hierarchical position in the organisation and crisis experience are positively related to an augmented perception of an impending organisational crisis.     

REVEALING THE UNSEEN: TOURISM,ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Contemporary cultural criticism is increasingly recognizing the central place that tourism occupies in organizing interactions, both economic and social, between different peoples in the world today. In this paper, I take up the question of what role photography plays in determining the nature of touristic experience.By drawing on Martin Heidegger's account of modernity as the epoch of modern technology, I seek to articulate an understanding of touristic photography that goes beyond conventional critiques of its objectifying character and tendency to conform to predetermined semiotic markers. Instead, by considering the examples of the photographing of local peoples, and of attempts to photograph what I refer to ‘the unphotographable sight’, I develop an alternative perspective on both the dangers and the epistemic possibilities of touristic photography. Such a perspective, it is argued, allows us to move beyond the identification of photography with the ocularcentric discourses of Western modernity and towards a consideration of the possibilities of touristic photography as art. By foregrounding the role of photographic images in the production of memory and self identity, it is suggested that tourism can be understood in terms of what Michel Foucault refers to as the creation of one's life as a work of art. Finally, I argue that by attending to the limits of touristic photography, the potential to develop a new way of seeing may be fostered.     

How Visual is Visual Prediction?

Infants are readily able to use their recent experience to shape their future behavior. Recent work has confirmed that infants generate neural predictions based on their recent experience (Emberson, Richards, & Aslin, 2015) and that neural predictions trigger visual system activity similar to that elicited by visual stimulation. This study uses behavioral methods to ask, how visual is visual prediction? In Experiment 1, we confirmed that when additional trials provide additional visual experience with the experimental shape, infants exhibit a robust novelty preference. In Experiment 2, we removed the visual stimulus from some trials and presented the predictive auditory cue alone, allowing the effects of neural prediction to be assessed. We found no evidence of looking preferences at test, suggesting that visual prediction does not contribute to the computation of visual familiarity. In Experiment 3, we provided infants with a degraded visual stimulus to test whether visual prediction could bias visual perception under ambiguous conditions. Again, we found no evidence of looking preferences at test, suggesting that visual prediction is not biasing perception of an uncertain stimulus. Overall, our results suggest that visual prediction is not visual, in the strictest sense, despite the presence of visual system activation.     

The Constitution of Impairment: modernity and the aesthetic of oppression

Impairment has been set aside in debates about disability dominated by the social model. This paper seeks to go beyond the Cartesianism which produces this neglect. It suggests that radical disability studies can prosper from a critique of modernity which entails a shift from its singular epistemological origins in the critique of capitalism. The argument challenges the contention that the oppression of disabled people is reducible to social restrictions which are the outcome of a set of structural determinations. It suggests that the oppression of disabled people is also umbilically linked to the visual constitution of impairment in the scopic regime of modernity. The vision of modernity is impaired by the assumption that to see is to know, that is, by its ocularcentrism. In deconstructing the visual culture of modernity, it is possible to demonstrate that the non-disabled gaze is a product of this specific way of seeing which actually constructs the world that it claims to discover. Using the work of Sartre and, to a lesser extent, Foucault, this paper argues that impairment is constructed-not discovered-in the non-disabled gaze. The invalidation and disfigurement of impaired bodies is, therefore, not simply an economic and cultural response to them, but also arises in the mode of perception which visualises and articulates them as strangers.     

Knowing the social world through literature: Sociological reflections on Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities

The general thesis of this contribution is that 'literature' - which I very loosely define as any kind of imaginative and stylistically expressive presentation of experience through written language, typically with a narrative structure - offers a way of knowing the social world equal in cognitive value to the more scientific discourse of sociology. Just as scientific accounts of social life are not a priori superior to laypeople's accounts in terms of the claim to knowledge of phenomena - even though they may improve on laypeople's accounts by way of techniques of observation and methods of data analysis - so literary and scientific-sociological accounts of social reality differ only in the mode of linguistically communicating knowledge, not in the claim to knowledge itself. Literature may refer to fictional entities that do not exist, but it is no less capable of imparting knowledge and less no capable of being true. I defend this thesis first by way of some general remarks on the idea of literature as a medium of sociological knowledge and then turn to what I see as an exemplary instance of sociological insight to be gained through literary writing in Robert Musil's monumental novel of 1930-1942, The Man Without Qualities . I conclude with some further comments on the methodological issues raised by invoking literature as a vehicle of sociological communication, as well as on the context of Musil's writing in Austrian culture of the early twentieth century and his relationship to other sociologically significant writers of the modernist period.     

Afterwardsness in film

The spectatorial paradigm proposed here develops directly from the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit, which developed out of Freud’s work on traumatic neuroses and the abandoned seduction theory. Afterwardsness, Laplanche’s reworking of Freud’s concept, and the cinema both share a concern with temporality. They also share a common interest in memory and are both bound to a particularly Laplanchean notion of translation. Film has always been thoroughly intertextual and has always sought to remake or (re)translate itself for differing generations and different nations. What I am suggesting in this essay is that spectators also remake films as part of the very process of spectatorship and that beyond the actual cinematic experience they carry a remade and remembered “film” with them. This view of spectatorship therefore takes afterwardsness as its motivating force. The experience of watching a film coincides also with the temporal directionalities described by Laplanche in relation to afterwardsness. Not only is the spectator left with memories from, and of, the film after it has ended, but any number of (frequently traumatic) enigmatic signifiers or messages may have been unconsciously recorded, requiring subsequent de‐ and re‐translation. Following a Laplanchian model, one might surmise that the cinematic spectator develops a cinematic unconscious on the basis of the “repression” of the messages received via the screen. This “repression” occurs as a result of the sheer volume and traumatic intensity of the visual and aural stimuli, which cannot be immediately ordered, understood, de‐ and re‐translated. These enigmatic messages, structured by the temporality of afterwardsness, provoke the spectator into a process of reconstruction, re‐translation. At the same time the visual and aural stimuli of the cinematic experience may also have an immediate effect on conscious perception or trigger the traumatic recollection of a previously unconscious trauma. Subjectivity in this context would thus be, as Laplanche asserts, a process of “auto‐translation”, provoked by the message of the other (see Laplanche 1992a). This other may well be partially or totally inflected by the hegemony of Hollywood; however, the de‐ and re‐translation that is part of the process of auto‐translation might enable an active “cinematographic performance” that may ultimately open up a critical space beyond the dominant discourses. (This notion of “cinematographic performance” is discussed in Guattari (1977).) These (traumatic) memories, enigmatic signifiers, the de‐translated remnants of one’s cinema history are re‐translated and remade, engendering a remaking of oneself around these fragments in a process of “auto‐translation”, what might also be thought of as a kind of re‐narration. There is an active, almost performative, dimension to this process of repetition in translation, in difference; an emphasis on re‐narration as part of a process of translation or re‐writing, a process of transformation. Thus it has been argued that:

Forward movement in life is achieved through a backward movement in memory, but one that is more than a simple regression. In place of the blocked nostalgia or nausea of the perpetual return, the past is transformed in such processes as “working through” and “deferred action”. This is […] performance that is iterative and interrogative—a repetition that is initiatory, instating a differential history that will not return to the power of the Same. (Burgin , p. 273)

The idea of a Nachträglichkeit spectatorship is to express the very dynamism of the spectatorial experience, to speak of the reconstructive and creative aspect of spectatorship. This process of spectatorship recreates the films it “remembers” and articulates a certain kind of love at first sight (always already at second sight) of the cinema, the expression of a kind of après‐coup of the coup de foudre.     

Lights of disenchantment: a study of Max Weber’s thesis on the ‘disenchantment of the world’ from the perspective of visual studies

At the end of 1917, during a conference at Munich University, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) made a bold announcement: ‘The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world”.’ In this article, I provide an interpretation of the notion of ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Subsequently, I present visual material that might further illuminate Weber’s idea. In the third part, I strictly concentrate my attention on one argument suggested by Weber: in ‘disenchanted’ societies ‘mysterious incalculable forces do not come into play anymore.’ Through two exemplary sculptures by the Danish artist Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1884), I continue my visual excursus on the ‘disenchantment’ thesis by connecting Weber’s account on the intellectualisation of religious world-views with the autonomisation of the aesthetic sphere. The overall ambition of this article lies in providing an introductory account to an important intellectual problem and historical process through visual and textual analysis.     

How Does Learning Impact Development in Infancy? The Case of Perceptual Organization

Pattern perception and organization are critical functions of the visual cognition system. Many organizational processes are available early in life, such that infants as young 3 months of age are able to readily utilize a variety of cues to organize visual patterns. However, other processes are not readily evident in young infants, and their development involves perceptual learning. We describe a theoretical framework that addresses perceptual learning in infancy and the manner in which it affects visual organization and development. It identifies five kinds of experiences that induce learning, and suggests that they work via attentional and unitization mechanisms to modify visual organization. In addition, the framework proposes that this kind of learning is abstract, domain general, functional at different ages in a qualitatively similar manner, and has a long‐term impact on development through a memory reactivation process. Although most models of development assume that experience is fundamental to development, very little is actually known about the process by which experience affects development. The proposed framework is an attempt to account for this process in the domain of perception.     

Being and Landscape: An Ontological Inquiry into a Japanese Rural Community

This essay aims to reflect on the idea of landscape and our relationship with it by taking the Japanese notion of furusato (native place) in its ontological dimension. Grounded in Heidegger’s ‘phenomenology of Being’ and ‘ontology’, a phenomenological understanding of fieldwork experience in a Japanese rural community will be developed in order to rethink both the furusato and the ‘Being-landscape’ relation. As a consequence, we will be concerned not with how people speak about landscape, but with how the landscape speaks through people. What will be brought to light are the landscape’s moral and relational dimensions: namely, (i) the responsibility towards both our communities and future generations and (ii) a more-than-physical understanding of landscape that alerts us to our belonging to a common world comprised of relationships and tasks.     

Framing the image of Sikkim

This article highlights the poetics and politics of visual culture and specifically tourist brochures and picture postcards that frame an indigenous Buddhist Sikkim for domestic and international tourists. Located in Northeast India, Himalayan Sikkim is a cultural mosaic constituted by almost 22 Indo-Tibetan and Indo-Aryan groups residing therein. It is argued that visual representations incisively frame Sikkim as a Buddhist landscape by selectively photographing mantras, sacred texts, saints, religious sites, murals and rituals that are connected with Buddhism. The growing efflorescence of Buddhism globally and the desire of tourists to experience Buddhist culture has given fresh impetus to imagining Sikkim as their living repository.     

People with sight impairment in the world of visual arts: does it make any sense?

Abstract

The article describes an educational and artistic project in Poland where individuals with sight impairments could learn more about visual arts through guided city tours around their greatest monuments, appreciation of art pieces and meetings with artists. During workshops, they could test their own artistic skills by creating tactile drawings, pottery sculptures, photographs and tactile picture book. The effects of their attempts were presented in a temporary exhibition in the contemporary art gallery (with an associated educational program). The exhibition was a significant experience both for the artists with visual impairments and the visitors. Through analysis of the structure and content of the artworks, the gallery visitors could understand more about the situation of people with sight impairments as they struggle with everyday tasks and how creative they are.