Dyaden,Gruppen und Teams: Die Rahmungen von Coachings und Supervisionen

This article examines what impact three different framings of personal oriented consulting interactions – dyads, groups and teams – have on the consulting situation. Intuitively consultants are aware that it makes a difference if a client is consulted in a face-to-face-interaction “under four eyes”, in the framework of a group which just started to know each other or in a team which is working together on regular basis. However, what are exactly the mechanisms which are working in the three different settings? And what exactly are their impacts on the consulting situation? This article provides first interpretations.     

A river revitalization: Seen through the lens of local community members

This article provides insight into a revitalization project of a river near Basle in Switzerland. The authors conducted an evaluation study to investigate the river revitalization from a social point of view. How do people, who spend their spare time there or who live near by, perceive and evaluate the changes? What does the revitalization mean to them? Do they support the nature‐preserving intentions? Might the ecological ambitions oppose behavioral habits and social life at the riverside? The research project included a visual part: visitors were first asked to take Polaroid photographs of what they liked and what they disliked about the locality. In a second step, they explained their pictures and their reasons for taking them. The article presents and analyses the visual and the verbal data. A nature‐oriented and ecological perspective emerges as but one of many ways visitors experience the area. Social and aesthetic arguments are prominent in the photographs and in the verbal evaluation of the revitalization project.     

The algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms

ABSTRACT

This article reflects the kinds of situations and spaces where people and algorithms meet. In what situations do people become aware of algorithms? How do they experience and make sense of these algorithms, given their often hidden and invisible nature? To what extent does an awareness of algorithms affect people's use of these platforms, if at all? To help answer these questions, this article examines people's personal stories about the Facebook algorithm through tweets and interviews with 25 ordinary users. To understand the spaces where people and algorithms meet, this article develops the notion of the algorithmic imaginary. It is argued that the algorithmic imaginary – ways of thinking about what algorithms are, what they should be and how they function – is not just productive of different moods and sensations but plays a generative role in moulding the Facebook algorithm itself. Examining how algorithms make people feel, then, seems crucial if we want to understand their social power.     

The ‘Fool’s Cap’ map of the world: exploring critical cosmopolitanism through cartographic critique

The ‘Fool’s Cap’ map of the world is thought to date from the late sixteenth century and is often attributed to a little-known Christian sect called the Familists. It places a map of the world in the place of a face inside a jester’s cap, playing upon the subversive figure of the jester and his ability to ridicule those in control. The Familists were cosmopolitan and valued the idea of the world citizen, but insisted upon self-reflection, in ways not dissimilar to contemporary scholars of ‘critical cosmopolitan’. This article makes a case for viewing the Familists’ thinking as an early form of critical cosmopolitanism – critiquing its own culture whilst maintaining belief in what constitutes a good ethical world citizen. It engages with the debates forged by thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum and Gerard Delanty, and links these to the idea of emancipatory potential of globalization advanced by Leslie Sklair.     

Mining photographs: David Goldblatt’s On the Mines

David Goldblatt’s photographs in On the Mines create a narrative of the mining industry. They can be read individually as fragmented emblems of the ways that mining has shaped both the city of Johannesburg and its people, and they can also be read in relation to our present perspective as testaments of history. Even in the most seemingly straightforward photographic image, photographs can offer vital metaphors that enhance our understanding of a place. As in the case of Goldblatt’s photographs, these pictures show Johannesburg’s mining-town beginnings, which transcend the specifics of the moment they were taken. They depict the economy and process of extracting gold from the earth, and likewise utilise an exacting economy of vision. His photographs include only essentials, but these photographs go beyond abstract economics to show the humanitarianism of the photographer too. Many of David Goldblatt’s photographs focus on the built environment, the structures of mining, housing and religious buildings. However, Goldblatt is not an architectural photographer. As such, we may speak, as Philip Ursprung evocatively put it, of both “pictures of architecture and the architecture of pictures.” Viewed from the perspective of “the architecture of the picture,” his images speak about Johannesburg’s social, economic and political context. Taken almost 50?years ago, these images have endured because they go beyond documentation. Goldblatt’s incisive vision is mute testimony to the deep critical thinking that he brings to bear in the making of images. As the citation for the 2006 Hasselblad Foundation Award asserts, “almost all of Goldblatt’s photographs have different layers of interpretation through which viewers, according to their experience and previous knowledge, unravel a tale.” This paper will begin by examining the tradition of documenting architectural structures, situating Goldblatt’s work in relation to the techniques and approaches adopted by photographers of architecture in the twentieth century and the meanings that their images convey. Thereafter, a discussion of the layers of interpretation that some of Goldblatt’s images yield will follow.     

Phototextuality: photography,fiction, criticism

Ever since the advent of the medium in the mid-nineteenth century, photography and literature have been involved in an almost constant dialogue and process of intersemiotic cross-fertilisation. The scholarly field that has recently begun to develop around the critical study of this kind of aesthetic border crossing – what will here be called ‘phototextuality’ – is as burgeoning as it is multidisciplinary, spanning over 150 years of literary, artistic, and cultural history. In this article – conceived as a ‘state of the art’ of contemporary phototextual practice – the author proposes to clarify our understanding of what a phototext is and does by focusing on three particular manifestations of the trend: namely, narrative photographs, photographically engaged fictions and a particularly stunning work of critical inquiry that embodies, as much as it examines, the image–text paradigm.     

Humanitarian response and stress in Kenya: gendered problems and their implications

ABSTRACT

Stress-related conditions such as burnout and post-traumatic stress disorder are a growing concern in the humanitarian sector. Aid workers themselves report not only that mental health problems are common, but that the support they receive from their employers is insufficient. Problematically, the experience of the international aid worker – particularly those who are white and from the global North – is often foregrounded in explaining what constitutes stress and related mental health problems. This indicates a wider problem of what is required of ‘the perfect humanitarian’ – a personality that is gendered and racialised – and how this influences the different experiences and treatment of national and international staff from aid agencies. This article explores the organisational culture and working conditions of humanitarian settings and their impact on the mental health and well-being of staff. It argues that there is a structural dimension to stress that is less to do with external security threats and more to do with the specific infrastructure, policies, and practices of humanitarian operations, with implications for aid workers which cut across dimensions of race, gender, and nationality.     

New soldiers and empty boys: imaging traumatic memory

This essay reconstructs one important context for images published by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW): the testimonial practices of anti-war veterans. First in small rap sessions, and then in unofficial public hearings, anti-war veterans recollected their war experiences in an effort to inform civilians about the US war in Vietnam, and mobilise them to oppose it. Photographs of introspective veterans – lost in memory – provide a visual idiom for the experience of ‘flashing back’ that was the basis for veterans’ testimony. If these photographs signify the central role of self-reflection in veterans’ anti-war organising, they also imply a distrust of graphic war photography – both images disseminated by the mainstream media and atrocity photographs taken by soldiers themselves. Anti-war veterans worried that war photographs catered to a consumerist appetite for intense, vicarious experience and provoked only a fleeting sense of revulsion. Compounding this distrust of graphic imagery was the circulation of war souvenirs, atrocity photographs taken by soldiers of their dead and wounded victims. Exploring portraiture as an alternative to photojournalism, this essay situates images of introspective veterans in relation to the pioneering activism of the VVAW and allies them with images produced by other activists working in the visual field, focusing on Martha Rosler’s ‘Empty Boys’.     

Photographs of disasters. An ethnomethodological approach

The essay analyses the photographs produced and circulated during the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake disaster in Japan, which show destroyed buildings, flooded landscapes, desperate people. Disaster destroys existing order. On first sight, the photographs of disaster depict this dissolution of order. The empirical analysis shows that the disastrousness of disaster is (also) created through the pictures of the disasters. The paper discusses why and in what way certain pictures reveal themselves to be iconographic of disaster and how they enter the visual memory as its representative. To achieve this, the study will invoke ethnomethodology. At the centre of the analysis is the question of the particular means with which these images illustrate the destructive force of the disasters and how pictures showing destruction and pain (‘pictures of pain’) turn into pictures effecting pain in the viewer (‘painful pictures’). The empirical study demonstrates: the photographs show the destruction of order; however, they do this in an orderly manner.

for Jörg Bergmann’s 70th birthday     

Circulating pictures: photography and exhibition in the Portuguese Pavilion at Expo 58

This article examines the interplay between photography and universal exhibitions, two modern phenomena which, in different ways, have allowed for the world to be seen and reconfigured in unprecedented ways. It considers world exhibitions not just as sites of movement but also as systems that crucially rely on the circulation of photographic images. Focusing on a specific, and so far unexamined, case study – the Pavilion of Portugal at Brussels Expo 58 –, this work combines historical reconstruction and critical analysis to demonstrate how photography and exhibitions are mutually affected and transformed by the contexts in which they are made available. Particular attention is paid to the way humanism has been photographically integrated into the national discourse, and to the role invisibility plays in both exhibition and propaganda processes. Moreover, it is argued that despite the profusion and impressive scale of the photomurals in the pavilion, photography occupied a significantly subordinate role in the broad exhibition programme. Investigating how photographs functioned at different levels and purposes, before, during and after the exhibition, this article excavates several discourses, networks, and photo-textual interactions, to evidence how the history of photography and the history of exhibitions are often inseparable from one another.     

The time and space of everyday life

This article argues that everyday life is related to all social relations and activities, including both the ‘official’ practices that are codified and normalized and the ‘unofficial’ practices and articulations of experience. Indeed, everyday day life is seen as the single plane of immanence in which these two forms of practice and articulation interrelate and affect one another. The lived experience of everyday life is multidimensional, composed of various social fields of practice that are articulated, codified and normalized to different degrees and in different ways (either officially or unofficially). Moving through these fields in daily life, we are aware of passing through different zones of time and space. There are aspects of everyday relations and practices more open to government, institutionalization, and official codification, while others are more resistant and provide the basis for opposition and social movements. Everyday life is a mixture of diverse and differentially produced and articulated forms, each combining time and space in a unique way. What we refer to as ‘institutions’ associated with the state or the economy are attempts to fix social practice in time and space – to contain it in specific geographical sites and codify it in official discourses. The relations and practices more often associated with everyday life – such as friendship, love, comradeship and relations of communication – are more fluid, open and dispersed across time and space. However, the two should not be uncoupled in social analysis, as they are necessarily interrelated in processes of social and political change. This is especially so in contemporary capitalism or, as Lefebvre called it, the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’.     

Photographic portraits of migrants in South Africa: framed between identity photographs and (self-)presentation

This essay explores how migration within the African continent is framed visually by passport photos as well as artistic documentary projects based in Johannesburg, South Africa. It offers examples of what type of photographic (self-)portraits are constructed, which photographs circulate and how African migrants’ self-images as well as South African society’s perception of them are affected by certain photographic images. The method employed is a close reading of some paradigmatic photographs. In addition, I will discuss different – and often gendered – ways in which African migrant subjects may become visible. In short, this essay asks, what photographic portraits construct the hegemonic view of the African migrant subject in the public sphere? Accordingly, the tension between visibility and invisibility of African migrants’ lives emerges in the interstices of the inquiry. The paper first looks at the taking of identity photographs, since the passport photo exemplifies how the individual is made visible by the nation state. It can simultaneously serve as a poignant reminder of the ambivalent qualities of photography: on the one hand, documenting and codifying, and on the other hand, creatively representing. In this context, the essay explores the possibility of remaining invisible or “opaque,” but also the conceivably more empowering representational aspect of photography such as we see in participatory (art) projects, which may be connected to the visual politics of self-expression and reflection.     

The power to fix the gaze: Gender and class in Victorian photographs of pit‐brow women

This article considers how Victorian discourses on gender and class operate both within and upon Victorian photographs of women miners (pit‐brow women) in their working clothes. The photographs come from the personal collection of Arthur J. Munby, a bourgeois man of the period. In contrast to other studies undertaken on his collection, this article considers these photographs in the context of their commercial sale. Thus this article aims to investigate why Victorian men, such as Munby, purchased such photographs. The article does this by rebuilding the discursive field that gave these photographs meaning. This reveals that the way in which these photographs were actively constructing categories of difference (class and gender) allowed them to signify in a number or erotic and sexualized ways. Furthermore, the article exposes how these particular photographs carried specific meanings of the erotic because these women, unlike other working‐class women, wore trousers. Finally it reveals the power such discourses held in structuring the experience of being a woman miner in the 1860's.     

Still face,moving face

The article examines two sets of photographs of the face: first, a set of images by Suzanne Opton of soldiers returned from tours of duty in Iraq/Afghanistan and second, Robert Lyons’ portraits of Rwandans. In conclusion, it looks briefly at Alfredo Jaar’s The Eyes of Gutete Emerita. It explores what pictures of the face can do. Responses to Opton’s images from passers-by who saw them mounted on huge billboards, as well as the photographer’s account of what she thought she was doing, and Lyon’s motives and reactions to his work are examined. Drawing in part on Ariella Azoulay’s political ontology of photography and Jacques Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible, the article asks what it is that these images of the face do, politically, and whether there might be a way in which the face, or its still image, and the event of photography in which the face is embedded, escapes the dominant regime of signification. The article argues that despite its widespread use in practices of biopolitical control, the face, or in some cases its still image, can prompt or generate action and challenge the dominant regime of signification and visibility.     

On being affected: feeling in the folding of multiple catastrophes

ABSTRACT

How possible is it for a life of ongoing feeling to hold, given the world’s current becomings? Much of this article will consider three of the most pervasive of the current disruptions as disruptions of living and feeling: climate change, social change, and, in more detail, what I will call a ‘third media revolution’. All three of these disruptions (and many others) are themselves multiple. They all fold through each other. Living and feeling thus find themselves in the midst of catastrophic multiplicity. This catastrophic multiplicity haunts much of what’s going on. Questions concerning what can be felt within this folding of catastrophes into each other are important contemporary questions. Feeling itself – what it is, what it does, and what the future of feeling might be – has become both a field of struggle, and a complex and open-ended question. A secondary set of questions here will concern the future of studies in relation to these questions of living and feeling – of Cultural Studies, Media Studies, disciplinarity in general, and finally ‘study’, as discussed by Moten and Harney (2013. The undercommons. New York: Minor Compositions).     

The ruins of Managua vieja: the use of expressive photography in urban ethnography

This article proposes a method of conducting urban visual work – a practice-led visual study in which researcher-generated expressive photography explores the ‘city-as-archive’ (Hetherington 2013) and contributes to the urban visual archive. The photographs used in this article focus upon the social world of material remnants in the setting of the old downtown of Managua, Nicaragua. The aim of the article is four-fold: to suggest the epistemological gains of expressive photography, to discuss the methodology and style, to present the use of these images in an urban visual ethnography of Managua and to address related ethical concerns. Although expressive photographs are used to some extent by scholars, there is a noticeable lack of discussion of the method and empirical examples in urban visual studies. In this article, I propose intentionally using expressive photography to convey the subjective and affective knowledge that is generally not communicated by more conventional, ‘realist’ documentary visual techniques. Moving into a more explicit conversation of the work process, I point out three arenas for inquiry, for which this method can be useful. I detail my own visual ethnographic practice, and present my primary visual aims in three image clusters: expressive photography in conjunction with historical images, theorising the oscillation between absence and presence and visually interpreting the vernacular design of the ruinscape. The article concludes with a consideration of ‘ruin romance’ as an ethical concern, as well as some reflections over perceived difficulties in using this method as a means of doing academic research.     

Studying the Sociology of Journalists: The Journalistic Field and the News World

This article makes a case for a socially situated and theoretically sophisticated approach to the sociological study of journalists. This is urgently needed for us to understand the increasingly complex news production environment and the rapidly evolving nature of journalistic practice. Two theoretical approaches to studying the sociology of journalists are outlined and discussed. The first is a development of Pierre Bourdieu's field theory; the second – the ‘news world’ approach – emerges from the social worlds approach commonly associated with Howard S. Becker. Each approach on its own shows considerable promise for the analysis of the increasingly complex news media environment. The article concludes that the journalistic field and the news world approaches could be combined to create a new framework for the sociological study of journalism that would provide a way forward for the important empirical research on journalists that is now needed.     

Suburban class habitus: applying Pierre Bourdieu’s visual sociology to the city

Streetscapes of two middle-upper-class suburbs in Melbourne, the State capital city of Victoria, Australia, are photographically compared. Selected pairs of pictures from each streetscape are discussed and contrasted, each pair being considered for how it illustrates one of the five aspects or dimensions in the chosen photographs from the respective suburbs. The near-similarity, yet subtle differences, seen from the street, in the housing and property facades in these suburbs, makes the comparison more difficult, but potentially more useful in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus manifesting not just in people as individuals but in their lived environment. This embodied class imperative is described in interpreting the selected photograph pairs as producing a suburban class habitus in how inhabitants inscribe suburban class distinction into where they live. Using photographs as a methodological tool like Bourdieu means that the point of these visual streetscape representations of each suburb is not summative, deploying the term as a neat or easy label, but aims to be consistent with Bourdieu’s approach as a way of investigating the complex socioeconomic and sociocultural mechanisms by which the naturalised class sense is expressed physically in these presentations of self from the street-views they offer.     

Which is the ‘self’ in ‘self‐interest’?

This article contends that homogenisation of the term ‘self‐interest’– in sociological and economic discourse – has resulted in many misconceptions about what particular doctrines of ‘self‐interest’ were instituted to achieve at certain historical periods and in specific cultural milieux. At its worst, the article argues, this has led to a misunderstanding of the import of particular doctrines of self interest,which are read in terms of general tradition – such as that which views self‐interested conduct as a natural faculty – rather than in terms of the context specific aims of those advocating them. The article attempts to show how, historically, there have been quite significant changes in the characterisation of the ‘self’ deemed to be ‘self‐interested’. In particular, it focuses on the ‘self’ of certain early modern conceptions of self interest, and suggests this creation is best viewed not as a subjectivity transcendentally presupposed by experience, but as one historically cultivated to counter the exigencies of particular circumstances – the disaster of perpetual ‘warre’ in 17th century Europe – and to meet the purposes of a certain way of life – existence in the civitas.