Visual Accountability

Abstract

In this article, we draw attention to the way in which accountability relations are manifested in and through the use of visual evidence. Through their status as representations of what is the case, evidentiary visual images frequently provide a basis for giving accounts and for raising questions regarding distributions of accountability. At the same time, and in a similar manner to numbers (Munro, 2001), such images become part of organized relations of accountability that can be noted as having ‘hailing’ effects: they call for and prefigure a certain kind of response and dispersing of responsibility. Here we examine how the use of visual evidence is embedded in discursive and material practices that variously create or inhibit possibilities for questioning, or interrogating, this evidence. Drawing on elements of ethnomethodology and actor‐network theory, we use ‘interrogation’ as the basis for depicting a three‐part analytical schema focused on opening up, closing down and temporality to explore how visual accountability is worked out in surveillance, traffic management and breast screening images.

Garfinkel on strategy: Using ethnomethodology to make sense of “rubbish strategy”

“…However, these meetings were also characterised by a continual sense of being called to account. Various 'hailing effects' (Neyland & Coopmans, 2014) accountability relations that call for and prefigure certain kinds of responsewere invoked as contexts through which the moral characteristics of Midsize City could be put to recycling work. These included suggestions that they were under pressure to up recycling rates from other members of the new waste management partnership.…”

Contemporary Art and Event-Based Social Theory

“…17. For accountability see Garfinkel (1967); for visual accountability see Neyland and Coopmans (2014). I expand the concept to an artistic accountability.…”

Provoking Animal Realities on TV: Exploring the Affinities between STS and Screen Studies

“…For Neyland and Coopmans (2014), making things visible also involves instituting accountable ways of questioning this vision or establishing “the practical arrangements in which visible evidence becomes (or is inhibited from being) subject to interrogation ” (p. 2). There is no doubt that the “Making of” episode is driven by a logic of interrogation.…”