Bringing their worlds back: using photographs to spur conversations on everyday place

This article poses a methodological argument for the use of expressive photographs in fostering more mindful discussions of the experience of everyday places. The article builds on the author’s ‘guided tours’ methodology of walk/make/talk, which involves asking inhabitants to take the researcher on tours of their everyday places, the researcher making creative visual representations of those places and then, bringing those images back to residents to talk about how the photographs are similar, or in contrast, to lived experience. The article uses examples from research in Brooklyn, NY, and Oakland, CA, to specifically explore the ‘making’ and ‘talking’ part of the process, and to argue for the critical distance gained when a participant has the opportunity to see their most commonplace and often unremarked worlds brought back to them through another pair of eyes. The paper considers distinctions with other photo-elicitation methods and discusses how this model of bringing people’s worlds back to them often allowed the jolt of a new perspective to suspend the taken-for-grantedness of the world, creating a time and opportunity to consider the everyday in more depth. It further discusses how the method enabled people to clarify three aspects of everydayness that are hard to pin down: the feel of place, emotional responses, and seeing past time. The paper challenges conceptions of photographs as ‘data’, champions expressive work in research, and proposes that photographs made by a range of authors can enable new ways of seeing, challenging and discussing the everyday urban environment.     

Through their eyes: seeing experiences of settlement in photographs taken by refugee background youth in Melbourne,Australia

Although ‘refugees’ are frequently represented in visual media, it is predominantly as the central subject matter and rarely are they positioned as the photographers of their own journeys. In this article, we present photographic images that have been taken by refugee background youth portraying their experiences of the first years of settlement in Australia. We consider how, in our longitudinal research conducted with 120 refugee background youth, visual materials can provide equally important yet different insights in comparison to written or spoken narratives on the experiences of refugee settlement. Through an examination of the photograph’s visual content, we explore the ways in which they portrayed their early experiences of external suburban settlement environments and their depictions of interior spaces and home-making practices. We discuss how these visual insights capture an alternative way of seeing the experiences of becoming at home as the youth become emplaced post-resettlement in Australia. We argue that the photographs taken by these refugee background youth illustrate how visual methods and materials can provide equally important but often overlooked insights into early settlement experiences. Importantly, the photographic images offer a way of portraying the people, places and sentiments that are central to the everyday lives of refugee background youths in ways that oral and written narratives cannot.     

Breasted experiences in pregnancy: an examination through photographs

Drawing on qualitative data from a sample of pregnant women in Hobart, Australia this article uses ‘feminist’ ‘memory work’ and the ‘photovoice’ method as frames for discussing the ways in which interviews and participant-produced photographs may be used to trace and understand pregnant embodiment. I argue that digital photographs taken by women during pregnancy can reveal important information about how they negotiate their own experiences of breastedness and wearing maternity underwear over time. Here, the concept of ‘breastedness’ itself is expanded as women’s individual embodied experiences of pregnancy are reflected in the production and viewing of their own photographic images.     

Photography and cultural memory: a methodological exploration

Recent years have seen a flowering of research and scholarship on cultural memory across the humanities and social sciences. Among the many facets of this work is a quest to extend and deepen understanding of how personal memory operates in the cultural sphere: its distinguishing features; how, where and when it is produced; how people make use of it in their daily lives; how personal or individual memory connects with shared, public forms of memory; and ultimately, how memory figures in, and even shapes, the social body and social worlds. Personal and family photographs figure importantly in cultural memory, and memory work with photographs offers a particularly productive route to understanding the social and cultural aspects of memory. Beginning with a study of one photograph, this article develops and interrogates a set of interlocking memory work methods for investigating the forms and everyday uses of ‘ordinary photography’ and how these figure in the production of memory.     

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.     

One hundred years of suffering? “Humanitarian crisis photography” and self-representation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Humanitarian images streaming from the ongoing conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are not “new”. In fact, contemporary aid and journalistic images strikingly mimic photographs created a century earlier during the Congo Reform Association’s humanitarian attack on Leopold II’s actions in the Congo Free State. This article explores the consistency of these photographic forms and their surrounding text, showing how the images of suffering are not simple reproductions of observed reality but carry personal, local and political meaning. By analysing image content as well as the subject and photographer’s experiences of image creation, this article expands beyond realist objectivity to encompass the subjects’ visual embodiment of subjective desires and expectations. Specifically, I examine how the photographic space composed of the photographer, camera and subject, becomes an intersection replete with competing expectations, hopes and tensions. To situate these images and their subjective, political and humanitarian weight within the DRC itself, I conclude with analysis of how the Congolese choose to present themselves to a different audience: themselves.     

Photography,cinema and medium as social practice

One of the more interesting aspects of the dialogue between the mediums of the still and moving image that has taken place over recent years has been a concern within fine-art photography for the cinematic. Photographers have turned to the style and iconography of the established genres of cinema as a means of reinventing the pictorial form of the tableau and thereby to explore the possibilities of narrativity within the static image. However, beyond any aesthetic interest the contemporary genre of the ‘cinematic photograph’ may hold, it is argued here that it may be indicative of an important shift in the social, economic and technological bases of fine-art photography. This essay suggests that the significance of the ‘cinematic photograph’ lies in its complex forms of technical production, the mobilisation of skilled labour and professional expertise, and the deployment of substantial economic resources, which are to be found in the film industry. Through an analysis of the work of the American photographer Gregory Crewdson, the authors demonstrate how the formal and iconographic properties of his images are inseparable from his adoption of the cinema's specific modes of production and that the latter is central to a reading of Crewdson's photographs. The consequences this holds for our understanding of the medium of photography are developed with reference to Raymond Williams's concept of ‘medium as social practice’. The authors conclude that the ‘cinematic photograph’ might be regarded as symptomatic of a trend within contemporary art practices to model themselves on cinema as the emblematic form of cultural production of ‘late capitalism’, a trend that has significant implications for the dominant conceptions concerning the nature of the work of art and the role of the artist.     

The exclusionary side effects of the civic integration paradigm: boundary processes among youth in Swiss schools

Civic integration policies have become common in many European states and require that immigrants commit to integrating into the host society. This article draws on a study with young people in Swiss schools and investigates how these new political debates around civic integration find resonance in everyday narratives about immigration. The boundary approach is used as a framework to study the daily (re)production of the ‘Swiss–foreigner divide’. It reveals that assimilation into ‘Swiss culture’ (e.g. speak the local language and conform to social norms) remains a criterion defining who can become a legitimate member of Swiss society. Nonetheless, integration deficits are often perceived as the rule and transformed into a stigma so that ‘foreigners’ are frequently not recognised as legitimate members of society. This study indicates how the Swiss youth in this study legitimise and (re)produce exclusion and how this exclusion is embedded within past and current Swiss immigration policies.     

Pet grief: when is non‐human life grievable?

This study explores how pet owners grieve their pets and view their pets' transience. Drawing on Butler's notion of the differential allocation of grievability, I have analysed interviews with eighteen pet owners. Butler argues that grievability is made possible by a normative framework which allows for some human or human‐like lives to be grieved, while other lives are rendered ‘lose‐able’. All the interviewed pet owners say that they are capable of grieving a non‐human animal, but analysis suggests that they make their pets grievable and ungrievable by turns. I argue that by maintaining this ambivalence, the interviewees negotiate pets' inclusion in a human moral community while simultaneously defending human exceptionalism. The article concludes with a discussion of pet grief as a potentially destabilizing emotion. I suggest that grieving beings on the border between grievable human and lose‐able animal – ‘werewolves’ according to Giorgio Agamben – may be a powerful way of challenging normative frameworks which arbitrarily render some human and non‐human lives lose‐able.     

The Politics of Temporality: An Analysis of Leftist Youth Politics and Generational Contention

Based on focus groups and in-depth interviews with young leftist political party activists in Uruguay, this article analyzes the dilemmas faced by young people as they use images from the past to interpret and orient their situation in the present and their aspirations for the future. They are the heirs to a highly romantic image of what it means to be a political activist on the Left; in this sense, the shadow of the radical Sixties and the omnipresent image of armed struggle and military dictatorship define them. But the reality of politics in contemporary democratic Uruguay is that of pressing for incremental and routine social reform inside a ‘Broad Front’ where ideological definitions for the future have become hazy. This paper explores the various ways that young Uruguayan Leftists work to reconcile these different senses of time and how these mediate their relationships with ‘significant generational others’. In so doing, I place the concept of time, of the perceived and socially constructed sense of acting in the current of a particular historical time, at the center of analysis.     

Reprogramming Femininity? The Construction of Gender Identities in the Israeli Hi‐tech Industry between Global and Local Gender Orders

Based on the study of gender identities in the Israeli hi‐tech sector, this article sets out to explore the doing of gender in a context comprised of two cultural repertoires characterized by divergent and contradictory fundamental assumptions: the new masculine transnational economy and pro‐natalist Israeli society. The article demonstrates how, by manoeuvering and moving between these global and local cultural repertoires, privileged Israeli hi‐tech women enact and construct a ‘new femininity’ that simultaneously challenges both the discourse of the ‘ideal hi‐tech worker’ and that of traditional Israeli femininity. This new femininity, I argue, is grounded in a local translation of the ‘family friendly organization’ discourse.     

Writing birthing bodies: exploring the entanglements between flesh and materiality in childbirth

ABSTRACT

This article enquires into the lived experiences of childbirth as a site of ‘fleshy becomings’ that disrupts the dominantly cleaned-up approaches to organising. Theoretically, we approach childbirth as a primitively humane experience in which birthing bodies become entangled with the materiality by which they are surrounded. The empirical material of the article consists of 12 in-depth interviews with first-time mothers in Finland as well as of photographs and autoethnographic research notes taken by the two authors of this article. By empirically highlighting the interplay between flesh and materiality in the ‘making’ of birthing bodies, this article offers novel viewpoints on the discussion of embodied experiences as well as on the entangled relations between flesh and materiality in the field of organisation studies. It also makes an empirical contribution using a unique contextual example of ‘birthing’ to illustrate how vulnerable topics can be researched, offering critical viewpoints on this subject.     

Visualising the invisible: children on the streets of Lima,Peru, realise the self through photographs

This article presents findings from a photographic project conducted with six adolescent boys living and working on the streets of Lima, Peru. In this article, I examine how photographs provided the boys with a means by which to express themselves and served to humanise these participants who exist at the most extreme margins of society. Drawing parallels between the participants’ use of photographs and the roles that photographs play for families, I examine how the ability to record and document their childhood provided the boys in this study the opportunity for critical engagement in the creation of their own histories.     

Narrative and Frame Alignment in Social Movements: Labor Problem Novels and the 1929 Gastonia Strike

Research on social movements and frame alignment has shed light on how activists draw new participants to social movements through meaning making. However, the ‘framing perspective’ has failed to interrogate how the form or genre in which frames are deployed affects the communication of meaning. The burgeoning literature on social movements and narrative would seem to point to one discursive form of importance to meaning making in social movements, but scholars have failed to connect their insights with the literature on framing. In this article, I analyze five novels published in response to a 1929 communist-led strike in Gastonia, North Carolina. I argue that labor movement activists deployed these long-form narratives for the purposes of ‘frame alignment,’ specifically ‘frame amplification’ and ‘frame transformation,’ and I show how these narratives conveyed frames in ways that other discursive forms could not. The study raises new questions about the selection and reception of discursive forms in social movements.     

Curative fictions: The ‘narrative cure’ in Judith Herman's trauma and recovery and Chantal Chawaf's Le Manteau noir

Abstract

The possibility of a so‐called ‘narrative cure’, whereby a survivor of traumatic experience can begin to deal with her past through integrating it into narrative, has become central both to psychotherapy and to literary criticism on writings of trauma as a means of ethical, ‘truthful’ testimony and of healing. This article seeks to question the correlation between testimony and ‘cure’ through analysing the function of the ‘narrative cure’ in a psychotherapeutic text and in a literary text. This highlights how any notion of ‘truthful’ testimony is always underwritten by fiction, which raises crucial ethical questions about the relation between fiction and ‘truth’, testimony and ‘cure’ and psychotherapy and literature. I argue that the ‘narrative cure’ is not a privileged space of curative ‘truth’, but a point of tension between memory and amnesia and between ‘truth’ and fiction; it is precisely this tension, I suggest, which should characterize and structure interdisciplinary responses to trauma.     

The new economy: a cultural history

Abstract In this article I look at some cultural aspects of the economic frenzy of the 1990s, a period often labelled ‘the new economy’. The focus is on the ways in which processes of culturalization became an important part of production, in such fields as e‐commerce and ‘the experience economy’. How was culture packaged and marketed in new ways, for example in the production of symbols, images, auras, experiences and events? I explore how the technologies of imagineering, performance, styling and design came to play important roles in this process. Other important traits of this development are discussed in a comparison with earlier examples of the emergence of ‘new economies’: the aesthetics and practices of speed, the cult of creativity, ‘the catwalk economy’ and the importance of public display and performance, as well as the importance of ‘newness’.     

Photographs in the cultural account: contested narratives and collective memory in the Scottish Islands

‘Traditional’ photographic images of people in the Scottish islands represent them as marginal and romantic, determined survivors become quaint curiosities. The discourse of modernity has produced a dichotomy between contemporary society and a pre‐industrial Arcadia that is vividly reflected in the emphasis on the anthropological ‘otherness’ of island ways of life. Yet whilst such stereotypes are evident from the archival record, the specific uses made of photographs by local communities suggests that these pictures also provide a resource for cultural accounting. Like the ‘reckoning of kin’ or the cataloguing of place names and archaeological sites, photographs constitute a shared basis for establishing awareness of an authentic, distinctive and continuous self‐identity. The view constructed by outsiders may thus be contrasted with a competing indigenous appropriation: the one stresses the schisms rent by transformed relations of production; the other counters modernisation theory in its celebration of continuity. Although the malleability of photographs as sources renders any fmal assessment difficult, a methodology for intertextual reading is suggested.     

If we practice posthumanist research,do we need ‘gender’ any longer?

This article offers a reflection around the question of ‘do we need ‘gender’ any longer?’ In taking up this problem and inspired by the way in which postqualitative inquiry has opened a conversation with Deleuzian philosophy and formulated a ‘concept as/instead of method’ line of thought, I wonder whether new images of thought might give the concept of gender ‘the forces it needs to return to life’ or the forces to abandon it. I propose four different images that might provoke the desire to experiment with a new image of thought in relation to the problem: a vegetal mode of thought, a musical mode, a fleshy mode as labiaplasty, a nonliving mode. This choice is connected to the dualities they target: the human/vegetal living world, the rational/artistic production of knowledge, the dis‐embodied/corporeal being in the world, the life/nonlife hierarchization. Each way of thinking of ‘gender’ stages, enacts, performs a different material reality of the concept that shifts the focus from linguistic representations to discursive practices. Hence, if gender has become a dominant discourse, it may be that positive repetition of this discourse might become a way of opening a new site inside it, by de‐territorializing it and re‐territorializing it otherwise.     

The powerful relational language of ‘family’: togetherness,belonging and personhood

This article examines the notion of ‘family’ to consider how it may be understood in people's everyday lives. Certain recurrent and powerful motifs are apparent, notably themes of togetherness and belonging, in the context of a unit that the person can be ‘part of’. At the same time, there may be important variations in the meanings given to individuality and family, evoking differing understandings of the self and personhood. I consider these ideas further through globally relevant but variable cultural themes of autonomy and relationality, suggesting the term ‘social person’ as a heuristic device to distinguish the sense of ‘close‐knit selves’ that may be involved in some understandings of personhood. I argue that this version of personhood may be powerfully expressed through ‘family’ meanings, with a significance which can be at least provisionally mapped along lines of inequality and disadvantage within and between societies around the world. These forms of connectedness may be hard to grasp through those theoretical and methodological frameworks which emphasize the (relational) individual. I argue that, in affluent English speaking societies, ¹ there may be little alternative to the language of ‘family’ for expressing such forms of relationality and connection.