On the relation between ‘visual research methods’ and contemporary visual culture

One of the most striking developments across the social sciences in the past decade has been the growth of research methods using visual materials. It is often suggested that this growth is somehow related to the increasing importance of visual images in contemporary social and cultural practice. However, the form of the relationship between ‘visual research methods’ and ‘contemporary visual culture’ has not yet been interrogated. This paper conducts such an interrogation, exploring the relation between ‘visual research methods’ – as they are constituted in quite particular ways by a growing number of handbooks, reviews, conference and journals – and contemporary visual culture – as characterized by discussions of ‘convergence culture’. The paper adopts a performative approach to ‘visual research methods’. It suggests that when they are used, ‘visual research methods’ create neither a ‘social’ articulated through culturally mediated images, nor a ‘research participant’ competency in using such images. Instead, the paper argues that the intersection of visual culture and ‘visual research methods’ should be located in their shared way of using images, since in both, images tend to be deployed much more as communicational tools than as representational texts. The paper concludes by placing this argument in the context of recent discussions about the production of sociological knowledge in the wider social field.     

Working with the grain? Towards sustainable rural and community development

This paper explores some connections between the ‘cultural turn’ in recent social theory, and the emergence of new models of local and regional development which have potential importance for the pursuit of sustainable rural development. Two particular examples of attempted cultural engineering, centred on ideas of ‘enterprise culture’ and of ‘corporate culture’, are reviewed and both shown to be flawed by their weak conception of culture. A more convincing account of its importance is derived from work on regional development which emphasises the role of social networks and institutional thickness in enabling the growth of confidence and trust as preconditions for success. It is noted that these institutional conditions show some surprising similarities to traditional social features of rural areas, and so help explain the shift from failed strategies of rural development towards more integrated approaches. A number of examples of contemporary development practice in rural Wales are described, to support the suggestion that the attainment of sustainable economic and social development in rural areas depends upon creating social and institutional networks which embed change within the prevailing social and cultural resources of rural populations.     

Culture,Development, and Social Theory: On Cultural Studies and the Place of Culture in Development

Debates in development theory have recently swung back to taking seriously the relationship of culture to development, especially in the face of manifest failures of conventional approaches to economic growth and social transformation. This has happened at a moment when, especially within anthropology, the concept of culture itself is undergoing critical examination, and when cultural studies has emerged as a major challenge to anthropology's self-defined specialisation in the social-scientific analysis of culture. Few attempts have been made, however, to relate cultural studies and development studies, despite the fact that the relatively recent ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences has derived largely from the currently fashionable status of cultural studies and its multidisciplinary nature. This paper explores this relationship and suggests that a cultural studies approach, despite its weaknesses, potentially revitalises the significance of culture in relationship to development.     

CCTV oddity: archaeology and aesthetics of video surveillance

The paper narrates #OCTV – an art installation, performance and hacktivist project – the authors presented at the International Visual Sociology Association annual conference (Goldsmiths 2013). The installation used networked CCTV cameras and affordance of digital media to make surveillance space visible, beyond its representational value. It played with the co-constitution of the surveillance images through technologies, cultural practices, and ethics. The paper suggests the visual work of CCTV cameras is contextual to the specific configuration surveillance ecology takes. It proposes art projects as critical methodology for unpacking the social construction of the digital image. As a consequence, it recognises the challenges of using once-upon-a-time ethics forms with regards to ecologies of the visual. Instead, it suggests an ethical and political tension which should follow research ‘data’ during the lifetime of the project, and possibly in the ecologies yet to come.     

Reflexive modernization and reconstructing the Third Way: a response to Mouzelis1

Nicos Mouzelis has made a welcome intervention into the debate over Third Way theory and politics. The strengths of Mouzelis’ account are identified as being his incorporation of asymmetrical power relations and institutional imbalances into the theory of reflexive modernization, and his defence of the Left/Right dichotomy. Three interrelated criticisms are then made. The first is of a sociological reductionism which neglects the importance of ideology and politics in bringing about the processes of reflexive modernization underpinning the Third Way. Conversely, the second criticism is that Mouzelis drifts into voluntarism in the form of a conspiracy theory in his account of ‘cultural engineering from the top’ amidst the conditions of reflexive modernity. Further, it is suggested that it is not with regard to achieving ‘cultural rights’ against such top‐down engineering that the Left/Right distinction endures, but rather in relation to how the role of the market is analyzed. Thirdly, at the level of institutional differentiation and power relations, Mouzelis underestimates the extent to which market logic is able to ‘colonize’ other spheres of social life, and his regulatory proposals are insufficient to address this.     

Decorative sociology: towards a critique of the cultural turn

In this paper we outline a critique of ‘decorative sociology’ as a trend in contemporary sociology where ‘culture’ has eclipsed the ‘social’ and where literary interpretation has marginalized sociological methods. By the term ‘decorative sociology’ we mean a branch of modernist aesthetics which is devoted to a politicized, textual reading of society and culture. Although we acknowledge slippage between the textual and material levels of cultural analysis, notably in the output of the Birmingham School, we propose that the intellectual roots of cultural studies inevitably mean that the textual level is pre‐eminent. In emphasizing the aesthetic dimension we seek to challenge the political self‐image of decorative sociology as a contribution to political intervention. We argue that while the cultural turn has contributed to revising approaches to the relationships between identity and power, race and class, ideology and representation, it has done so chiefly at an aesthetic level. Following Davies (1993), we submit that the greatest achievement of the cultural turn has been to teach students to ‘read politically’. The effect of this upon concrete political action is an empirical question. Without wishing to minimize the political importance of cultural studies, our hypothesis is that, what might be called the ‘aestheticization of life’ has not translated fully into the politicization of culture. We argue that an adequate cultural sociology would have to be driven by an empirical research agenda, embrace an historical and comparative framework, and have a genuinely sociological focus, that is, a focus on the changing balance of power in Western capitalism. We reject the attempt to submerge the social in the cultural and outline the development of an alternative, integrated perspective on body, self and society. We conclude by briefly commenting on three sociological contributions to the comparative and historical study of cultural institutions which approximate this research agenda: Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Sennett.     

Legal discourse and the cultural intelligiblity of gendered meanings1

This paper considers the methodological challenges that ‘post-modern’ approaches to gender ( Cameron 2005 ) pose for the field of language and gender. If we assume that gender cannot be ‘read off’ the identities of speakers, but rather is a social process by which individuals come to make cultural sense, then how do we best investigate this process? As Stokoe (2005) and Stokoe and Smithson (2002) have argued, it is problematic within such frameworks to conduct research that pre-categorizes individuals as women and men, since it is individuals' constitution as women or men that should be the issue under investigation. Indeed, for Butler (1990: 145), to understand ‘identity as a practice … is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse’ (emphasis in original). This suggests that we attend to cultural norms of intelligibility (i.e. the ‘rule-bound discourse’) and their effects. Following Blommaert (2005) and Woolard (forthcoming) , in this paper I investigate a speech event, a courtroom trial dealing with sexual assault, where understandings of social identities and categories (i.e. ‘norms of intelligibility’) are not only evident in the local talk of speakers and hearers, but also in the recontextualizations of this local talk by powerful institutional representatives (i.e. judges). By examining such recontextualizations of courtroom talk, gender is not ‘read off’ the identities of individuals (i.e. courtroom participants) but rather investigated as it appears in the cultural sense-making frameworks of judges. Moreover, given that judges are the ultimate interpreters of the linguistic representations of courtroom talk, this paper also demonstrates some of the social consequences associated with the performance of culturally intelligible and unintelligible gendered identities.     

Ethics in context: essential flexibility in an international photo-elicitation project with children and young people

ABSTRACT

Existing literatures have discussed both ethical issues in visual research with young people, and the problems associated with applying ‘universal’ ethical guidelines across varied cultural contexts. There has been little consideration, however, of specific issues raised in projects where visual research is being conducted with young people simultaneously in multiple national contexts. This paper contributes to knowledge in this area. We reflect on our experiences of planning and conducting the International CYCLES project involving photo elicitation with young people in Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK. While some issues such as varying access to technology for taking and sharing photos and diverse cultural sensitivities around the use of photography were anticipated in advance, others were more unexpected. Balancing the need for methods to be appropriate, ethical and feasible within each setting with the desire for sufficient consistency across the project is challenging. We argue that an ‘ethics in context’ approach and an attitude of ‘methodological immaturity’ is critical in international visual research projects with young people.     

‘Ink Art’ as strategy for Hong Kong institutions

Abstract

In both their wider cultural dimensions and the institutional practices they stem from, the practices of ink art in Hong Kong manifest themselves in a variety of discourses ranging from the ‘traditionalism’ of the conservative nativists to the ‘contemporaneity’ of artists and institutions often identified as being closer to ‘Western’ culture. Even though the most influential discourse about ink art in Hong Kong has clearly been produced by official institutions, like the future museum of visual culture called M+ and the already existing Museum of Art, it has also been profoundly influenced by private associations whose influence has been far reaching. The most visible of these private associations in Hong Kong is the Ink Society, whose founding members and their affiliates and friends have played a central role in the early debate about the nature of ink art in the history of local arts. Through an analysis of a failed attempt by the Ink Society to bid for the right to manage a historical site, this paper attempts to unravel some of the ideas that support the notion of ink art in Hong Kong.     

Critical autism studies: exploring epistemic dialogues and intersections,challenging dominant understandings of autism

In this paper we explore how our cultural contexts give rise to different kinds of knowledges of autism and examine how they are articulated, gain currency, and form the basis for policy, practice and political movements. We outline key tensions for the development of critical autism studies as an international, critical abilities approach. Our aim is not to offer a cross-cultural account of autism or to assume a coherence or universality of ‘autism’ as a singular diagnostic category/reality. Rather, we map the ways in which what is experienced and understood as autism, plays out in different cultural contexts, drawing on the notion of ‘epistemic communities’ to explore shifts in knowledge about autism, including concepts such as ‘neurodiversity’, and how these travel through cultural spaces. The paper explores two key epistemic tensions; the dominance of ‘neuro culture’ and dominant constructions of personhood and what it means to be human.     

Public sphere as assemblage: the cultural politics of roadside memorialization

This paper investigates contemporary academic accounts of the public sphere. In particular, it takes stock of post‐Habermasian public sphere scholarship, and acknowledges a lively and variegated debate concerning the multiple ways in which individuals engage in contemporary political affairs. A critical eye is cast over a range of key insights which have come to establish the parameters of what ‘counts’ as a/the public sphere, who can be involved, and where and how communicative networks are established. This opens up the conceptual space for re‐imagining a/the public sphere as an assemblage. Making use of recent developments in Deleuzian‐inspired assemblage theory – most especially drawn from DeLanda's (2006) ‘new philosophy of society’ – the paper sets out an alternative perspective on the notion of the public sphere, and regards it as a space of connectivity brought into being through a contingent and heterogeneous assemblage of discursive, visual and performative practices. This is mapped out with reference to the cultural politics of roadside memorialization. However, a/the public sphere as an assemblage is not simply a ‘social construction’ brought into being through a logic of connectivity, but is an emergent and ephemeral space which reflexively nurtures and assembles the cultural politics (and political cultures) of which it is an integral part. The discussion concludes, then, with a consideration of the contribution of assemblage theory to public sphere studies. (Also see Campbell 2009a)     

Class and family

This paper seeks to make a contribution to debates on ‘class analysis’, as well as exploring the role of the family in class reproduction. A broad distinction is drawn between primarily ‘economic’ and primarily ‘culturalist’ accounts of class reproduction. It is argued that despite their differences, these accounts also share many similarities. In particular, both approaches identify the role of the family as central to the reproduction of class. However, economic and cultural accounts cannot be integrated into a single ‘theory’, one reason being that the mechanisms whereby economic and cultural capital are transmitted are different. Nevertheless, economic and cultural approaches may be (and should be) used in combination with each other in order to develop a full account of the reproduction of class inequalities. In developing these arguments, a critique is offered of current theories of ‘individualisation’ in relation to class and the family. The argument is illustrated by two ‘worked examples’; teenage motherhood, and the patterning of mothers’ employment.     

Media Visualisation of Conflict: Studying News Imagery in 21st Century Wars

This article considers the influence of the ‘visual turn’ in diverse academic literature on the media representation of conflict. Primarily drawing on examples from American and British scholarship, the article presents encouraging evidence that the visualisation of conflict in news media is finally getting the kind of sustained theoretical scrutiny and rigorous empirical analysis that it deserves. Authors from varied disciplinary fields of research, from security studies to visual culture, are now engaging in a range of analytical and empirical investigations into the purportedly powerful roles of mediated visual imagery during wartime, employing conceptual tools such as ‘mediatisation’ and ‘performativity’. This article offers a summation of some of the key approaches: their intersections, distinctions and usefulness; while suggesting trajectories for further critical research into media visualisation of conflict.     

Good Governance as Managerialism: Rationalisation and International Donors in Vietnam's Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Sector

Donors’ appreciation of their relationship with Vietnam as a ‘mature development partnership’ requires explanation. Drawing on Rural Water Supply and Sanitation policy, the article argues that the success of donor collaboration with Vietnam is based on Vietnamese political culture coincidentally aligning with a managerialist ‘world culture’, presently extant in the form of neoliberal ‘good governance’ development orthodoxy. The article shows that Vietnam ‘delivers’ rationalised development policy to international donors through its system of state administration and planning, the implementation of target‐oriented planning and the role of statistics in the policy process. The strength of the ‘darling’ partnership is explained in relation to this cultural dimension of legitimacy creation through the performance of rational development planning and administration.     

Using Visual Art Workshops with Female Survivors of Domestic Violence in Portugal and England: A Comparative Reflection

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a reflection on the use of visual art workshops in an interdisciplinary feminist project with female survivors of domestic violence living in refuges in England and Portugal. The paper discusses the fieldwork in each location with attention to the interaction between participants, between participants and the researcher/s, and the cultural and institutional structures influencing the research and the images produced. Despite some key differences in the context, the analysis highlights key resonances and commonalities amongst the objects that survivors of domestic abuse depicted in each location. We use the feminist notion of ‘giving voice’ as an analytical tool throughout the paper. The paper argues that ‘giving voice’ was not unproblematically accomplished by using visual methods and suggests that our understanding remained partial and often reliant on verbal narratives accompanying the visual images produced. We also highlight issues of power emerging when exhibiting art generated through the study.     

WHAT ABOUT THE OLD CULTURAL INTERMEDIARIES? AN HISTORICAL REVIEW OF ADVERTISING PRODUCERS

Critical work on advertising is underscored by a teleological conception of its object. This often emerges in the form of an emphasis on advertising as an evolving, hybrid institutions that increasingly mixes the ‘economic’ with the ‘cultural’. It is in this vein that advertising practitioners have been characterized as ‘new cultural intermediaries’ deploying distinctive aesthetic sensibilities. Similar patterns of knowledge and behaviour, however, can be traced amongst early producers of advertising suggesting a generation of ‘old’ cultural intermediaries. This unexpected phenomenon, it is argued, arises for two reasons. The first is that much critical work addressing the nature of contemporary advertising lacks historical context. The second is that culture and economy are normatively conceptualized as separate spheres. This separation underplays the multiple interconnections between the cultural and the economic in instances of material practice. Accordingly it is proposed that advertising be reformulated as a constituent practice that has historically relied upon the juxtaposition of ‘cultural’ and ‘economic’ knowledges.     

Decolonizing Indigenous disability in Australia

Cultural diversity and social inequality are often ignored or downplayed in disability services. Where they are recognized, racial and cultural differences are often essentialized, ignoring diversity within minority groups and intersectionality with other forms of oppression. This is often an issue for Indigenous Australians living with disability. This paper argues that understanding Indigenous disability in Australia requires a critical examination of the history of racism that has systematically disabled most Indigenous people across generations and continues to cause disproportionate rates of impairment. Approaches that focus on the cultural ‘otherness’ of Indigenous people and fail to address taken-for-granted normative ‘whiteness’ and institutional and discursive racism are unable to escape that history.     

DIRTY DIAPERS AND THE NEW ORGANIC INTELLECTUAL

This article examines the conjuncture in the last decade of the political, economic, demographic and cultural forces in the USA that have facilitated the emergence of a complex identity category, the ‘single mom’ – a category that has come to stand for the failure of the welfare state and the purported possibilities of neo-liberal self-sufficiency as well as for the rearticulation of those conditions. The ‘rationalities of government’ that make freedom an increasingly difficult state for poor women to achieve are connected to the production of a set of ‘practices of the self’, in the form of cultural texts ranging from self-help literature to television and film that represent and advise single mothers on how to demonstrate their self-sufficiency and self-governance. It is argued that analysis of single mothers is a critical component of understanding current social conditions as they are played out in the USA in the realms of domesticity, family and mothering, realms often given short shrift in comparison to cultural studies' work on public cultures and spaces.     

Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’

Responding to the September 2011 special issue on ‘Rethinking Convergence Culture’, this essay seeks to identify ways that the author's thinking about convergence and participatory culture have shifted over time, often in ways that are closely aligned with the issue's contributors. Throughout the essay, the author addresses the links between cultural and political participation, the challenges in using new media in support of democratic change, the ways that institutional power structures continue to exert strong influence on our culture despite or perhaps because of significant expansion of who has access to the means of cultural production and distribution and the challenges and opportunities for doing cultural theory in an era of neo-liberal capitalism.     

‘Aboriginal mass culture’: a critical history

In Australia, some Aboriginal art objects are celebrated as fine art of great cultural, aesthetic and economic value, while the vast majority are judged to be stylistically derivative and intrinsically compromised by overtly mercenary market forces. This article introduces the concept ‘Aboriginal mass culture’ as a means for understanding the significance of the often maligned forms of the Aboriginal art and culture industry in Australia and to address the problem of why it continues to be difficult to demarcate the space of Aboriginal fine art. While a canonical and connoisseurial art history approach must disavow the vast majority of ‘Aboriginal art’, this article embraces a sociological perspective and turns an analytical eye upon the Aboriginal art and culture industry in its entirety, treating it as a phenomenon of visual culture that mediates Indigenous/non-indigenous relations within national public culture. It offers a critical history of ‘Aboriginal mass culture’ from the market for ‘Aboriginalia’ in the post-Second World War era through to the unruly Aboriginal art market of the present day. In so doing, it illuminates some of the drivers of these cultural forms across commercial, governmental and civil society domains. Its analysis reveals the way in which ‘Aboriginal mass culture’ manifests the unique social and economic circumstances that underpin Aboriginal art practices and the ways in which Aboriginal art is entangled with a redemptive political and civic project in Australia that has sought to affirm a resilient Indigenous presence and stimulate new visions of nationhood, heritage and intercultural fellowship.