Editorial

After forty successful years of publishing and supporting otherrelated activities, the Community Development Journal remainsat the forefront within the field of community development.Its coverage of material from the north and south as well aspractice and theory ensures that the Journal continues to commanda unique position among academic journals. The recent introductionof online advance access publishing and e-letters ensures theJournal reflects the best in publishing. This issue begins with an article by Glen Laverack, in whichhe introduces the concept of the ‘domains approach’to community empowerment, which is illustrated by a case studyfrom Kyrgyzstan. Extrapolating from the community developmentliterature, Laverack identifies     

Evaluating community capacity: Visual representation and interpretation

The purpose of this paper is to provide an interpretation ofprogramme experiences in the visual representation of strategiesused to build community capacity. The paper first discussesthe definition of community capacity in a programme contextand describes different approaches for the visual representationof the evaluation of community capacity. What is new about thispaper is that it provides a discussion about the interpretationof community capacity and in particular the use of the spiderweb configuration (so called because of the shape it resembles).This is illustrated by three examples taken from two differentcommunity development programmes, the first of which is in Fijiand the second in Kyrgyzstan. The paper concludes with a discussionabout the implications for the community development practiceof using visual representations of community capacity, includingthe difficulties, for example, of mapping changes in communitycapacities over time, and the benefits, for example, of promotinga free flow of information between stakeholders. The paper willassist practitioners to better plan for, evaluate and visuallyrepresent the findings of strategies used to build communitycapacity in community development programmes.     

Benda Bilili – ‘look beyond the images’: representations and visual narratives of disability in Kinshasa

In this article we address a number of visual narratives that represent physical disability in Kinshasa, D.R. Congo. Drawing on visual material that was collected before and during anthropological fieldwork (between 2010 and 2014) we offer an insight into the interrelation between representations and physical disability within a Congolese context, as represented in four documentaries. The text briefly reflects on representations of the ‘Other’ and wants to add a reflection on representations of disability that originate from an African urban context. Our examples are complemented with in situ analyses derived from fieldwork that question how particular narratives portray disability and dis(en)ablement within a Congolese socio-cultural context. Thus we invite to look beyond the images. Finally, the article adds a critical reflection about these visual narratives as dis/enabling through their specific construction of dis-ability.     

‘Weightless?’: disrupting relations of power in/through photographic imagery of persons with intellectual disabilities

Missing in discussions of visual representations of people with intellectual disabilities are their own perspectives. Rooted in Derrida’s concern with the ‘right of inspection’ over visual representations, participatory arts-informed methodologies were used in research with people with intellectual disabilities. They critiqued and then used Photoshop to transform public photographs of labeled people. Responding to visual constructions of labeled persons as ‘weightless’/powerless, they revealed personal experiences of being denied control over their lives and representations. Yet their critiques and transformations reveal possibilities for their re-conceptualization as powerful, subverting stereotypes of labeled people and disrupting relations of power in disability imagery.     

The myth of modernity in popular african art: Symbolic representations in popular carving and painting

The contemporary artists of Lusaka, Zambia are engaged in an image-making process. They present idyllic portraits of an Africa “as it was” to an audience of tourists and outsiders and play upon a unique blending of traditional and contemporary symbols for an African audience. The latter symbolic forms are representations of modernity and depict both the positive aspects of social change (e.g., material improvements) and its negative dimensions (the gradual destruction of tradition). This paper examines images of modernity in the representations of the natural world, men, and women by contemporary African artists. These images are living myths in the making and are expressive cultural responses to a diverse audience of consumers in a rapidly changing cultural milieu.     

A note on images of networks

Visual imagery and visual representations have proven very useful in some of the most important discoveries in the history of science. It is not surprising, therefore, that the earliest students of network phenomena often made use of visual representations (e.g. sociograms) to assist in the analysis, interpretation and illustration of complex relational data: by creating such visual representations, human faculties for visual imagery and pattern recognition could be more fully utilized in the search for structural patterns in sociometric networks. What is somewhat surprising, though, is that the techniques for creating visual representations of relational data have remained virtually unchanged since the study of social networks began: the slow, tedious, pen-and-ink approach of forty years ago is still very much the method of the day.Readily available computer graphics technology, however, introduces potentially powerful possibilities, and some of these are explored. The results of this initial exploration suggest that the time is ripe for forging new tools that will facilitate the analysis of complex relational data, stimulate the development of network theory, and provide new perspectives from which to view previously hidden facets of society.     

Individuals as authors of human rights: not only addressees

I propose human rights as self-authored through a personality structure of “assertive selfhood.” To that end I identify three features of self-authorship: emergent through collective political action; as a critical stance; and borne by non-idiosyncratic norms. So conceived, human rights require a field of recognition as a social structure supportive of claims to assertive selfhood. I show that the capacity to self-grant depends critically on the participant’s personality structure as well as on the structure of some of the social institutions he or she inhabits. But like any political vision, the project for self-granted human rights has distinct limits, above all with respect to the many inequalities among potential self-authors.     

Taking the visual turn in research and scholarly communication key issues in developing a more visually literate (social) science

This article identifies some major impediments on the road to more visually literate forms of research and scholarly communication and advances some ideas for improvement. These recommendations relate to each of the following issues: the indispensable awareness for the magnitude of types of visual representations and their distinct implications, the need for clarifying the role of aesthetics in a scientific discourse, the need for a more explicit visual methodology and theory, the crucial role of technology, the importance of staying tuned with our audiences, and of fostering a thoughtful eclecticism and interdisciplinary exchange.

Making progress in each of these domains will result in an improved “visual scientific literacy,” a term that could be used to denote a set of skills and attitudes which manifests itself as very proficient visual thinking and acting throughout the complete research process. More visually literate scholars will be able to take better advantage of visual reality as a field for research and of the growing supply of representational tools and techniques to make sense of it and to communicate about it in an appropriate manner.     

Adolescents' Attachment Representations and Their Capacity for Intimacy in Close Relationships

A secure state of mind with regard to attachment, as assessed by the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), as well as attachment styles as assessed by questionnaires (the two most prevalent facets of attachment representations assessed in adolescence and adulthood) were examined as potential contributors to adolescents' capacity for intimacy. Eighty male Israeli adolescents were administered the two measures and reported on their impulsiveness during their senior year of high school. Four years later, at the end of their mandatory military service, they were interviewed regarding their capacity for intimacy, and they filled out questionnaires. State of mind with regard to attachment and attachment styles uniquely predicted capacity for romantic intimacy and affective relationships with friends. Impulsiveness interacted with attachment security (benefiting dismissing and avoidant participants, and hampering secure ones) in predicting romantic intimacy. The discussion underscores the distinctiveness and importance of different facets of attachment representations to close relationships with peers.     

The media of sociology: tight or loose translations?

Sociologists have increasingly come to recognize that the discipline has unduly privileged textual representations, but efforts to incorporate visual and other media are still only in their beginning. This paper develops an analysis of the ways objects of knowledge are translated into other media, in order to understand the visual practices of sociology and to point out unused possibilities. I argue that the discourse on visual sociology, by assuming that photographs are less objective than text, is based on an asymmetric media‐determinism and on a misleading notion of objectivity. Instead, I suggest to analyse media with the concept of translations. I introduce several kinds of translations, most centrally the distinction between tight and loose ones. I show that many sciences, such as biology, focus on tight translations, using a variety of media and manipulating both research objects and representations. Sociology, in contrast, uses both tight and loose translations, but uses the latter only for texts. For visuals, sociology restricts itself to what I call ‘the documentary’: focusing on mechanical recording technologies without manipulating either the object of research or the representation. I conclude by discussing three rare examples of what is largely excluded in sociology: visual loose translations, visual tight translations based on non‐mechanical recording technologies, and visual tight translations based on mechanical recording technologies that include the manipulation of both object and representation.     

Network visualization and problem-solving support: A cognitive fit study

This study examines the relative effectiveness of four different social network representations for improving human problem-solving accuracy and speed: node-link diagrams, adjacency matrices, tables, and text. Results suggest that visual network representations improve problem-solving accuracy and speed, compared with text. Among the visual representations, tables produced superior problem-solving outcomes for symbolic tasks and link-node diagrams produced superior problem-solving outcomes for spatial tasks. These results partially support a cognitive fit model of problem-solving support. There is not “one best way” to represent network data. Instead, it is important to match network representations and problem-solving tasks.     

The cultural apparatus: C. Wright Mitts’ unfinished work

Conclusion Mills wrote to his Oxford publisher in 1955. “One book grows out of another; the trouble is not only is there no end to it, but after the second is pressing upon you before you can finish the first, for planning is more fun than working.” 78 Indeed, this mode of working was common to all of Mills’ projects. He worked fast and furiously and always juggled a number of different ideas in various stages of formation. This certainly was the case with The Cultural Apparatus. In a 1955 letter to his publisher Mills enthusiastically said of the book “I'm into it.” He predicted, optimistically, that unlike his other books, this book would be easy, a natural for him that “writing it will not involve the anguish that White Collar and Elites have provided.” By 1959, however, Mills had to admit that this optimism was premature. In “The Personal Note to the Reader” he confessed that “I've never had so much trouble writing a book as I have with this one, and I’ve never taken so much pain with the writing of it as I’ve taken to heart the criticism of being repetitious, verbose and prone to jargon.” 79 Mills never completed the project. By the late 1950's he became preoccupied with the political issues of “war and peace” and American foreign policy in Cuba, the latter in particular. His health was poor as a result of a heart attack he suffered in December of 1959 on the eve of a televised debate with an American advisor in Latin America, A.A. Berle. He became embroiled in what he understood as necessary public work from within the media and he remained adamant about the personal significance of The Cultural Apparatus in 1959.     

Philosophy on the Ground: An Appreciation of a “Spirit Master”

This essay is an appreciation of Melvin Pollner’s distinctive sociological approach to topics that are usually associated with philosophy. Pollner’s dissertation and early writings took up the theme of “mundane reason,” which he defined as an incorrigible presumption of a real world that is implicit in everyday conduct. Pollner addressed mundane reason, and the reciprocal idea of “reality disjunctures”—momentary divergences between perceptual accounts of the “same” mundane reality—by describing routine exchanges in traffic court and confrontations between doctors and patients in psychiatric settings. Pollner’s work anticipated current enthusiasms for developing novel “ontologies” in social and cultural studies of science, medicine, and other subjects. Although he did attempt to locate metaphysics in the midst of everyday experience, this essay suggests that his “philosophy on the ground” radically transformed philosophical ontology into an original and imaginative way to investigate constitutive activities.     

Moving images: The media representation of refugees

The paper takes the form of a broad-based exploration of the visual representations of refugees across a range of media forms. Firstly it suggests that these media images have origins in Christian iconography. Then the discussion considers the treatment of forced migration in the fiction film, proposing that cinema representations often conform to the "road movie" genre. A discussion of contemporary issues in the media representation of refugees points to the necessity and direction for future research on the subject.     

An integrated model for conceptualising visual competence in scientific research and communication

Visual representation in both natural and social sciences is an important and growing area of research and an ever‐growing practice, given the rapidly developing visual imaging technologies. This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the complex processes and decisions that go into producing and using visual representations as prime vehicles of knowledge building and dissemination. To that aim the author develops an integrated theoretical model for disclosing and interrelating the vast array of aspects in representational practices that affect the appearance and the uses that can be made of their visual end products. This knowledge will help towards developing scientific integrity and optimising expressive capabilities in scientific visual culture. In developing the model, explicit attention is paid to the diverse nature of referents in scientific research, the complex interplay across various types of ‘translation processes’ in arriving at legible and valid data, the imminent ambiguities and growing hybridity of visual representational methods and techniques, and the determining role of purpose and the urgent need to develop a more encompassing set of visual competencies among scholars.     

Motherhood,Myth and Gendered Agency in Political Violence

By building on theoretical insights from poststructuralist feminism and Roland Barthes' mythology framework, this article is offering a nuanced understanding of female agency in political violence by engaging with the visual and the cultural, by using a broader definition of agency in political violence and by analysing what gendered representations of war mean at the domestic level. In the first part of the article, the Myth of Motherhood is conceptualized as a meta-discourse disciplining representations of female agency in political violence. The article then focuses on two specific discourses within the meta-discourse, the Vacant Womb and the Deviant Womb, that inform understandings of gender, agency and political violence in one particular cultural artefact: the British television drama, Britz. The main argument is that motherhood is ‘everywhere’ in representations of female agency in political violence and that it is useful to think about motherhood as a myth. Only this way can we confront underlying norms, values and ideas believed to be common sense and think differently about gender, agency and political violence.     

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.     

Seeing poor children: Three artists' views

This essay explores representations of poverty in art. In so doing, the visual arts are offered as a supplement to traditional textual studies of poverty. The depiction of poor children in particular is rare before the modern period, and reasons for this are explored. Significant literary and artistic treatments of children in poverty, which begin to appear in the 19th century, are considered in the context of philosophical, political, and economic developments of the time. The New York painter of street children J. G. Brown represents Victorian era painters of poor children in that he distanced himself and his images from reality. More involved in the lives of the poor was the early 20th-century German printmaker Ka¨the Kollwitz, who steered away from the impetus to abstraction of that period in favor of an emotionally charged, politicized, activist approach which focused on the topic of children in misery. Finally, the use of photographs to document poor children is briefly summarized to set the stage for a consideration of the work of Wendy Ewald. This artist's novel approach of giving poor children the means to depict themselves and their own world breaks down the barrier between artist and subject and unifies them in a common purpose.     

Visual Dominance and Visual Egalitarianism: Individual and Group-Level Influences of Sex and Status in Group Interactions

This study investigated visual dominance and visual egalitarianism of men and women (N = 94; 17 teams) in team meetings at diverse workplaces. Two novel gaze-related measures were developed: (a) a group visual dominance ratio (group-VDR) assessing each member’s visual dominance vis-à-vis all other members, and (b) a gaze distribution index (GDI) assessing each member’s visual egalitarianism to all group members. Multilevel analyses were conducted to account for influences of the team members’ sex and status on the individual level and for influences of sex and status composition of the teams, and the team leaders’ sex on the group level. Results suggested that high-status individuals displayed more visual dominance than low-status individuals. The significant interaction of individuals’ sex and status indicated that the positive relationship of status and visual dominance applied particularly to women. The more women in a team, the more visual dominance was displayed. The team leader’s sex significantly influenced visual egalitarianism: Gaze distribution was less egalitarian when the team leader was male.     

Reading the trophy: exploring the display of dead animals in hunting magazines

Photographs of trophy animals in 14 popular hunting magazines were analysed to explore the visual representations of dead animal bodies. We found multifaceted messages about the relationships between humans and other animals grounded in narratives of gender, race and embodiment. The visual representations of dead animal bodies are embedded in the taken-for-granted stories of love and affection for nature and wildlife that frame the contemporary hunting agenda, including the assumption that trophy displays memorialize the beauty of nature and natural animals. Disentangling ourselves from that dominant notion of what it means to display dead trophy animals was revelatory. Instead of love and respect for nature and wildlife, we found extreme objectification and marginalization of animal bodies. While we observed some elaborate displays of reassembled and carefully positioned dead bodies to appear as if still alive, a number of trophy exhibits hid the animal body behind or beneath weapons and other hunting equipment. The vast majority of the hunters in the images were white males, and when women or men of colour were included in the photographs their representations were usually consistent with gender and race stereotypes. Of these race/gender stereotypes the most interesting (and most symbolic of the patriarchal nature of the hunting discourse) was that neither women nor men of colour ever held a weapon when they appeared in photographs with white men.

Hunting was not about getting enough vitamin B 12. (Donna Haraway, Primate Visions 1989:217)