Visibilities and Visual Discourses: Rethinking the Social With the Image

Abstract

With this special issue, we aim to address visibility not just as a representation of the social, but as an aspect and element of social and cultural orders and actions sui generis. The texts in this volume are dedicated to understanding the practices, power relations and the technological infrastructures in which (audio)-visual practices unfold. To make our proposition clear, we lay out a methodological strategy that we—drawing from French, German and Anglo-Saxon debate—call sociology with the image. Then we provide an overview of the articles in this special issue and point to some ongoing tensions within qualitative inquiry more broadly.

Machine Vision and Social Media Images: Why Hashtags Matter

“…We focus on the affective agency of cultural objects (Traue et al, 2019) and regard digital images as such. That is, we understand digital images as having agency and affective potential, and accordingly, we view images as operative (Farocki, 2004; Hoelzl, 2014), not merely representational.…”

Introduction: Visual Sociology and the Relational Image

“…With these two vignettes, we sketch out the multiplicity of image-driven performativity and the reciprocity of image performances as conversation. In this regard, the sociology of the image is not just an analytical task or a matter of looking harder or more closely but is an examination of what actively shapes the frames of our seeing (Traue et al 2019 ). These frames, the spaces of constructed visibility and provocations to see are always bound by or in response to a system of power, however subtly.…”

“…In this book we build on this logic and reflect on the changing nature of the image through examination of practices and politics in contested spaces whilst seeking to advance visual sociology as a scholarly field. In an effort to do so, we propose, in addition to signposting new techniques and remits of complementary visual practice that might be co-creative and co-authored, it is also necessary to think about a progressive step away from a sociology of or through images (Goffman 1976 ; Harper 2002 ; Heng 2017 ; Krase 2012a ) towards a sociology with images (see Traue et al 2019 ). It is here that we move away from the image per se and think more intensively about visibility, the process of becoming visible and relationality (Bratchford 2020; Nathansohn and Zuev 2013 ; Zuev 2016 ) that points at visual sociology’s post-disciplinary futures (Cambre forthcoming ).…”

Multimodal Analysis in Qualitative Research: Extending Grounded Theory Through the Lens of Social Semiotics

“…In parallel, studies of discourse have also begun to analyze visual material, such as photographs and videos, in addition to text-based documents (Christmann, 2008;Traue et al, 2019). In both research traditions, grounded theory can be used as a basic research method to collect and analyze data (Clarke, 2003;Johnson, 2014;Timmermans & Tavory, 2012).…”