International

Visual
Sociology
Association

Seeing Beyond Dualisms:

Visual Sociology in Local and Global Contexts
27-29 June 2023
Multimedia University of Kenya
Welcome

IVSA Governance

Conference Information

Program at a Glance

Full Program

Cover image: Nairobi National Park and Nairobi skyscrapers by Murad Swaleh
via Unsplash.
 Welcome to IVSA 2023
We are very excited that you are part of the 2023
International Visual Sociology Association Conference!
Your thought-provoking submissions in response to the
theme of ‘Seeing Beyond Dualisms: Visual Sociology in
Local and Global Contexts’ have generated an incredibly
rich and diverse program. Following our true IVSA style,
visuality is integrated in every aspect, so you will engage
with video, photography and art in all of our panels,
workshops, keynote addresses, posters and exhibits.
A few notes and highlights:
● Art and posters will be on constant display at the
back of our main plenary room. Please, explore them
during any of our breaks. We are designating time for
all of us to give focused attention to posters and art
exhibits during the evening cocktail at 5:30 to 6:30 on
Tuesday 27 June. Creators of posters and art are
requested to attend and be by your work to engage
in conversation and answer questions.
● We will be screening films on a loop throughout the
conference on a flat screen TV towards the front of
the plenary room. This year, we are excited to
announce that in addition to films submitted to IVSA,
we are also screening selected films from
 Ethnografilm, an IVSA co-sponsored film festival. Feel
free to watch films anytime, except during plenary
programming.
● Plenary programming this year includes the Golding
Address for Visual Sociology in Motion by David
Kendall, screening of the film Winds of Sabia, and a
plenary panel on Perspectives on Visual Sociology
from Kenya.
We will flow seamlessly between plenary and parallel
sessions of panels and workshops, and between indoor
and outdoor spaces. The grounds of Multimedia University
of Kenya are green, lush and inviting, the perfect place to
discuss visual theories, methods and forge collaborations
and friendships. It is a quiet time at MMU, with the
academic year having just finished. So feel free to explore
the campus and take a walk with colleagues new and old.
We hope you come away from the conference with new
ideas, inspirations and connections. Please let us know if
there is anything we can do to help with your conference
experience.

Your Conference Co-Directors,

Matthew Harsh, California Polytechnic State University
Yolanda Hernández-Albújar, Universidad Loyola Andalucía
 The International Visual Sociology
Association
Board of Directors

Greg Scott President

Susan Hansen Vice President
Wesley Shrum Treasurer
Joshua Warren Graduate Student
Representative
*Vacant Technology Advisor
Gary Bratchford Visual Studies
Representative

Sabina Andron Board Member Elect

Gaby David Board Member
Katalin Halasz Board Member Elect
Christine Louveau
de la Guigneraye Board Member
Molly Merryman Board Member
Ernesto Noronha Board Member
Julie Patarin Jossec Board Member
Han Sang Kim Board Member
Suezen Salinas Board Member
Lakshmi Srinivas Board Member
Mariko Smith Board Member
Paola Tiné Board Member Elect

IVSA 2023 Team

Matthew Harsh Co-Director

Yolanda Hernández Albujar Co-Director

Paul Mbatia Local Committee

Mark Schafer Local Committee
Wesley Shrum Local Committee

Susan Hansen Conference Committee

Molly Merryman Conference Committee
Ernesto Noronha Conference Committee
Greg Scott Conference Committee
 Conference Information
Conference Location
Multimedia University of Kenya, Main Campus, Magadi
Road.
If you are traveling to campus via rideshare, allow enough
time for traffic. Please be sure to make sure you are using
this location: https://goo.gl/maps/ydqHUQBUhUJTvxft8

Conference Venue: The Administration Block

Conference events will take place in the Administration
Block building. Upon arriving at campus, you can exit your
vehicle, proceed through the gate on foot and then walk to
the Administration Block. Alternatively, you can have your
driver pass through the gate and then drive you all the way
to the building. The walk is less than 10 minutes (see route
below). Look out for banners that will help direct you. This
is the location for this building itself:
https://goo.gl/maps/bG3y66Tu62oT5Yse7

Security
Please be ready and allow time for security checks when
arriving at campus. Bring your passport or ID. MMU
security staff will log your information. They may request
that you leave your ID/passport at the gate. This is normal
and your ID will be safe. Just do not forget to pick it up
when you leave campus. You can feel very safe on MMU’s
serene campus.

Animal Safety
Whenever you are on campus, please take care around the
non-human residents. Families of warthogs constantly
roam freely to munch grasses. They are usually very
peaceful. The baboons, on the other hand, are very
cheeky. They have been known to steal food and they can
be aggressive. Keep your distance from all the animals, and
please don't try to feed them.

Registration
Registration opens at 9 am on Tuesday, 27 June. The
registration desk is located on the ground floor of the
Administration Block building. Please check in at the
registration desk and grab your name badge upon arrival.

Chairing Sessions
The conference is operating under a self-chairing model for
panel sessions. By default, the first-listed participant in
each session can serve as chair for that session, or another
participant can volunteer to act as chair. The primary role
of the chair is to keep time: each presenter has 15 minutes
to present, which will leave 30 minutes for discussion.
Please, be considerate to all presenters and do not extend
your talk over the time limit. Also, direct yourself to the
allocated room for your panel 10 minutes earlier, so you
can upload the presentation and be ready to start on time.

AV
Each of the rooms for parallel sessions is equipped with a
projector, screen and speakers. Computers will NOT be
provided. We ask that at least one participant from each
panel bring a laptop. Please also ensure you have the
appropriate adapter, if needed, to connect your computer
to the projector.

Internet and Wifi

Please do not rely on wifi for your presentation, or
streaming any video. Bring your presentation on a
pendrive or other external storage device for easy transfer.
We encourage participants to have a backup capability to
connect to the internet via mobile phone. Please see the
information about mobile phone internet access in Kenya
on our travel guide.
Food and Drinks
Our aim is to keep you well fed and caffeinated throughout
the conference, all at no additional cost to you beyond the
registration fee. Everyday we will have morning and
afternoon tea breaks, where tea, coffee and snacks will be
provided. Lunch will also be provided everyday. There will
be vegetarian and vegan choices, but these dietary
preferences are not as common in Kenyan culture, so
options may be more limited. Beer and wine will be
available during the cocktails at the end of the first and last
days of the conference. We will provide some bottled
water throughout the conference, but please bring extra
water. Participants coming from international destinations
should not drink any tap water in Kenya.
 Conference at a Glance

Tuesday 27 June

9:00-9:45 Registration and badge distribution

9:45-10:30 Welcoming remarks:

Vice-Chancellor of MMU, Kenya Ministry
of Education, IVSA President

10:30-11:00 Tea break

11:00-12:30 1.1.a Climate change and visual

environmentalism

1.1.b Meaningful spaces

12:30-1:30 Lunch

1:30-3:00 1.2.a Memory, identity and belonging

1.2.b Workshop
Hands on Workshop: Making Ethnographic
Videos
3:00-3:30 Tea break

3:30-4:30 Golding Address for Visual Sociology in

Motion
David Kendall

4:30-5:30 Awardees presentation

5:30-6:30 Cocktail hour with posters & exhibits

 Wednesday 28 June

9:00-10:30 2.1.a Health & safety rights

2.1.b Seeing beyond the camera

10:30-11:00 Tea break

11:00-12:30 2.2.a Education

2.2.b Workshop
Sociology of Scientific Presentation: The
BBC Model and New Formats for Science
Education

12:30-1:30 Lunch
1:30-3:00 2.3.a Cultural, artistic, and popular
representations

2.3.b Colonial relations and resistance

3:00-3:30 Tea break

3:30-4:30 2.4.a Creativity in social practices and

research

2.4.b Contesting hegemonic culture

5:00-6:30 Screening: The Wind of Swabia

by Corrado Punzi
 Thursday 29 June

9:00-10:30 3.1.a IVSA Ethics Think Tank

3.1.b Theory and methods

10:30-11:00 Tea Break

11:00-12:30 3.2.a Other ways of knowing

3.2.b Workshop
Mixed Media Auto/ethnography: Using
Qualitative and Visual Methods to create a
Love Story through videos, photos,
conversations and essays
12:30-2:30
Lunch & Business meeting
2:30-4:00 Plenary Panel: Perspectives on Visual
Sociology from Kenya

4:00-4:30 Tea break

4:30-5:00 Closing remarks

DVC Academic of MMU, IVSA President

5:00-6:00 Farewell cocktail

 Full Program

Tuesday 27 June

1.1.a Climate Change and Visual Environmentalism

Ethnographic and Participatory Documentary for Social
Development; concepts, methodologies and impacts. By
Michael Brown. Marginal Voices.
This paper explores how ethnographic and participatory
documentary may be positively affecting people's lives and
environments around the world, whilst questioning the
very concept of sustainable development. Drawing on a
symposium hosted by the Centre for Documentary
Research (Queen's University, Belfast), in partnership with
Kathmandu University School of Arts, the paper offers
case-study examples of how international practitioners
and academics (across north America, Europe, Asia and
Latin America) have used ethnographic and participatory
filmmaking as an action promoting positive change.

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Cross-discipline community engagement case-study
examples include: health related in Nepal; environment
related in Brazil; female ex-combatant related in Nepal,
Uganda and Columbia; and sustainable indigenous culture
related in northern Canada.
The methodologies employed draw from theoretical
underpinnings including Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the
Oppressed and ‘critical consciousness’, and the Johari
Window. The paper has a strong reflection on tangible
impact, showing how ethnographic participatory
filmmaking initiatives have supported positive change in
the lives and environments of marginal and vulnerable
communities. These case study examples are set against a
broader backdrop that questions the UN Sustainable
Development Goals, suggesting an alternative lens through
which to view sustainable development.
Keywords: Ethnographic and participatory filmmaking,
sustainable development, community engagement

Reclaim the Ground. By Julie Patarin-Jossec. Royal Society

of Arts.
«Reclaim the Ground» is an essay documentary film
grounded in the documentary poetics genre, including an
original experimental soundtrack. The film is structured
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around ecofeminist statements (adapted from a Caroline
Merchant’s text) highlighting the cultural politics of daily
pollution via littering in natural environments. Through the
articulation of voice-over and a soundtrack made with
effect pedals and an electric guitar, the film tries to build a
multilayered narrative where the soundscape emphasizes
the visual language of the video, and where boundaries
between documentary and poetics are questioned.
The film has been produced using videos and photographs
shot during the Summer 2020 in the St. Petersburg region,
in Russia, as a dialogue with local ecofeminist collectives.
Keywords: Essay film, Ecofeminism, Documentary
poetics, Soundscape, Littering

The visual tale of two different narratives of industrial

progress. By Corrado Punzi. University of Salento
A visual research on the memories of an industrial city: the
case of Brindisi, in South of Italy. The author has conducted
a two-year visual search in the city of Brindisi, motivated
by recent medical and judicial evidence on the dramatic
socio-health consequences of one of Italy's most impacting
industrial poles. From a territory with an agricultural, fish
and tourist vocation, Brindisi has succumbed to the lure of
industrial development plans and now it seems to implode

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at the sight of the consequences on its own physical and
cultural conformation. In an indirect apology of visual
sociology, the research attempts to observe and point out
that more than half a century of massive industrial
colonization has profoundly changed the
self-representation of the city, in a descending parable that
involved its expectations of the future and, simultaneously,
its own memory and identity.
Keywords: Climate change, fossil energy, progress and
development, South of Italy and South of the World

1.1.b Meaningful Spaces

Negative curation: How claims over the public visual
landscape are contested. By Susan Hansen. Middlesex
University London.
This talk draws on my study of the graffiti and street art
produced during the 2017 postal plebiscite for same sex
marriage in Australia, including activists’ creative visual
responses to the hate speech that proliferated in urban
and suburban areas during this highly charged period. The
study has a particular focus on the wholesale erasure of
street art and graffiti bearing political messages in support
of, or against, marriage equality. Communities increasingly
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exert stewardship over the public visual landscape, and
may engage directly in buffing graffiti or street art deemed
offensive, or defending and restoring work deemed
valuable. The analysis draws on repeat photography and
video materials showing a series of attempted erasures of
pro-same sex marriage murals by so called religious
‘activists.’ These materials show both the active challenges
from passersby these erasures attracted, and the buffers’
defense of their actions, which affords a unique level of
insight into the divisive social dialogue of this period. The
results of this specific study will be used to look at other
cases, in other places, where contested claims over the
public visual landscape have been visualised.
Keywords: street art, graffiti, ethnomethodology, visual
analysis

The Public Abode: A Visual Inquiry into Traces of

Homemaking in Seoul’s Public Space. By Anneke
Coppoolse. College of Fine Arts, Hongik University.
Seoul, like many of East Asia’s cities, has been subject to
rapid urbanisation. The city was left badly damaged after
Japanese occupation (1945) and the ensuing Korean War
(1950-53), which ushered in a period of urban
development. In the first decades after the War, due to a

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concentration of investment and employment in the
metropolitan area, Seoul’s population boomed. Large-scale
infrastructural projects were developed, and the city
sprawled outward as new towns were constructed. Until
today, the urban fabric of Seoul is continuously adapted to
suit its logic of capitalism. “Densification” of the urban
environment following this development informs both the
spaces of the city and the spaces of the home.
In the interstices between these two locales—between the
public spaces of the street and the private spaces of the
home—we find another kind of space: a space that is not
planned top-down but has come about organically; for its
tiny footprint still a marker of urban density but most of all
a unique kind of “public abode”. At street corners, along
neighbourhood hiking trails, and on pavements, we find
clocks, mirrors, and chairs: objects taken from homes and
placed in the streets. Clocks, mirrors, and chairs,
superimposed on public space, create new spaces but also
offer new perspectives of Seoul’s density and of its urban
fabric. This paper therefore inquires into these three
objects, and into their placement, usage, and meanings in
the context of public space and placemaking.
Keywords: Everyday Life, Placemaking, Public Space, Seoul

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No Heritage Found on Map: Hong Kong's Vanishing
Hakka Traditions. By Scott McMaster. EDUHK.
Twenty years after its 1997 handover back to China Hong
Kong remains a unique place on the world’s stage. British
colonialism has left many enduring marks on Hong Kong
identity as well as on its physical landscape. One of the
most peculiar, and controversial, is the legacy of the Small
House Policy of the New Territories; an agreement reached
between the British and the village leaders after it leased
the New Territories in 1898. In a city of severe land
scarcity, this unusual law grants decedents of ‘original
villager’s’ families (mainly Hakka people), upon their 18
birthday, rights to build a maximum three story house of
no more than 2100 sqft. With skyrocketing housing prices
downtown, this has created a boom of these ‘village
houses’ being build and sold, mainly to ‘new villagers’
migrating from the city, on lands that once were Hong
Kong’s farms and rice paddies. This has led to rapid
changes in the visuality of these once traditional villages.
Most notable is the disappearance of the traditional Hakka
ancestral family homes.
This visual ethnographic study, now in it's final stage,
began by using image-based methods to identify the
tangible disappearance of Hakka visual culture in the form
of derelict pre-colonial traditional homes that are
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dwindling in number. However, emerging themes using
grounded theory that prize participants ways of knowing
to guide the research have found that while the visual
cultural representations of these homes and their
disappearance are lamentable even more so is the decline
of more intangible, yet visual, traditions of food culture
and village festivals which are dying out due to the effects
of migration and intergenerational stagnation.
Keywords: Hakka, visual ethnography, precolonial, Hong
Kong Villages

The traumatic space of the frontier as immersive

re-enactment: the critical aspects of Iñárritu's Carne y
Arena. By Luca Acquarelli. University of Lille, Geriico
Laboratory.
In the new forms of re-enactment, between history,
witnessing and memory (Grau, 2003), virtual reality
technologies are used with the aim of decreasing the
distance between the spectator and the event, often with
the ambition of producing an empathy machine, especially
in humanitarian videos that seem, in recent years, to have
undergone a kind of "VR turn", just think of some
documentary works such as Walk in the Ranger's Shoes
(Kathryn Bigelow, 2017), RV Omni (Ai Weiwei, 2017) or

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Clouds over sidra (Chris Milk and Gabo Arora, 2015).This
"ultimate empathy machine" (a term used by Chris Milk) of
virtual experience, beyond its claimed efficacy, actually
poses many critical problems that some authors have
begun to highlight (Zucconi, 2018). An interesting case in
this sense is Alejandro González Iñárritu's art installation,
Carne y Arena (2017), which brings into play some central
elements of the memory of the traumatic event of the
migration through the Arizona desert, such as the
witnessing of the survivors, the staging of the trace and
re-enactment of the trauma, not without highly critical
aspects.
Our presentation will provide an analysis of this artwork,
which in addition to the immersive room proposes other
intermedial forms of re-enactment, and then suggest
critical reflections on the representation of the witnessing
of the traumatic event (Alexander, 2003), on the capacity
to feel the pain of others (Boltanski, 1993 and Sontag,
2003) and to be involved in the injustice that causes such
pain, and finally on the problem of transforming this
feeling into political value.
Keywords: re-enactment, virtual reality, empathy,
trauma, intermediality

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1.2.a Memory, Identity and Belonging
Afro-Amerasians: Blackness in the Philippine Imaginary.
By Angelica Allen. Chapman University.
This research project focuses on the experiences of a
community in the Philippines known as the Black
Amerasians (a population born from the union of African
American military men and Filipina women). It examines
how they actively define their own identities and shape
the ways in which they are perceived by the larger Filipino
community. Despite their membership in one of the largest
and oldest Amerasian diasporas, Black Filipino Amerasians
remain one of the most unrecognized and
under-researched communities to arise from the
Philippines’ neo-colonial relationship to the United States.
Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork with Black
Amerasians living near two of the largest former U.S.
military bases—I examine how members of this
community form and negotiate their identities while living
near militarized zones, and I analyze how they grapple with
racist and gendered mythologies that assign Blackness a
marginalized space in the Philippine social hierarchy. The
proposed presentation for this research conference will
examine the visual ethnographic element (in the form of
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photographs) of this project which combines oral history
narratives with visual images of my research community. In
addition, as someone who is both a member of and a
scholar to this community’s experiences, I provide an
auto-ethnographic “snap-shot” of the process of
conducting this project.
Keywords: the African Diaspora, the Black Pacific, U.S.
Militarization, Autoethnography

Photo-elicitation and Local Collective Memory

Reconstruction: the Case of Roma Minority in Pescara. By
Paola Di Carlo. Università degli Studi di Trento.
The present work discusses the case of a marginalized area
in the city of Pescara. Despite this is one of the Italian city
with the highest density of population belonging to the
Roma minority, it still represents a largely unexplored case.
The field of research constitutes a peculiar context for at
least two reasons. First, Pescara has been one of the key
places for the sedentarization process of Roma people in
Italy. Second, this city and the entire region to which it
belongs stand out as national outliers due to the absence
of nomad camps. In Pescara, indeed, the members of this
community live in public houses mainly located in the area
of investigation. This presence within the area has led to

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the emergence of conflictual situations with the
majoritarian population. In this sense, studying the
experience of this minoritarian local community becomes
an opportunity to reflect on the creation of stigmatized
spaces and to investigate (re-)territorialization practices.
Through an ethnography work, the intent was to observe
the interaction between Roma people and the majoritarian
population. In particular, through the visual tool of
photo-elicitation the intent was to stimulate reflexivity and
storytelling memory of this local minority. The photos
depict the same interviewed subjects from the
neighborhood in the 1980s. Old photos, thus, represent a
medium through which the members of this community
are empowered to tell their own story and to become
politicized minority-based subjectivities, thanks to a
process of local collective memory reconstruction, which
has always been denied.
Keywords: Photo-elicitation, Collective Memory, Roma
Minority, Re-territorialization

Sensing Belonging by Polish Labour Migrants in Norway:

Towards Embodied Transnational Belonging. By Karolina
Nikielska. Jagiellonian University.

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This paper, based on a collection of 54 interviews with
Polish labour migrants settled in Norway, discusses how
migrants’ transnational sentiments, nostalgia, and
attachments to places and people materialize through the
bodily experiences of the subjects. By doing so it
conceptualizes the notion of embodied transnational
belonging understood as a dynamic, bodily felt
materialization of social, cultural, political, economic, and
affective processes that assist the emplacement of people
on the move in new localities, and that span the borders of
nation-states. The author discusses how the concept of
embodied transnational belonging can be employed to
extend the understanding of migrants’ transnationality
suggesting its suitability to address a knowledge gap in
transnational studies. This gap is reflected in questions of
how transnationalism is exercised on a level of bodily
experience of the migrants and whether transnationality is
a solely mental/rational phenomenon, or rather a
bodily/physical one as well. Theoretically, the paper builds
on the premises of phenomenology of perception and
utilizes interdisciplinarily the concepts from anthropology,
health studies and migration studies.
Keywords: migration, sensory sociology, photo elicitation,
transnational belonging

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Anti-Black Social Media Memes and Internalized Racism.
By Devon Wright. Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Through a qualitative content analysis of anti-black racist
social media memes collected from and reshared by
African Americans, I aim to show the persistence of
internalized racism within African American collective
self-identity. Internalized racism is understood here as the
process by which White supremacist ideology (the
interrelated myths of innate White superiority and
inherent non-White inferiority), becomes part of an
historically oppressed racial group’s collective self-identity.
Internalized racism functions to justify racial oppression by
demanding racially oppressed groups participate in
perpetuating White supremacist ideas by accepting them
as “truths”, internalizing these “truths” as reflective of self,
and reflecting these ideas back onto the broad racial group
to which one belongs. As “one of the most neglected and
misunderstood components of racism” in sociology (Pyke
2010: 551), I aim to show how the persistence of
internalized anti-Black racism reveals the fluid adaptability
(Doane 2017: 979-980), of White supremacy in terms of its
ideology.
Collected from Internet social media platforms including
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, I categorize these
twenty-eight anti-Black racist memes into thematic
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criticisms of Black culture according to 1) poor financial
habits, 2) self-defeating racial/cultural disunity, 3)
disrespectful public appearance and 4) weak family values.
In the 21st century digital Information Age of
#BlackLivesMatter activism and increased attention to the
persistence of systemic racism, eradicating the deep roots
of white supremacy must include confronting the insidious
internalization of White supremacist ideology.

1.2.b Workshop
Hands on Workshop: Making Ethnographic Videos. By
Greg Scott, DePaul University; Molly Merryman, Kent State
University and Michael Brown, Queen´s University, Belfast.
This low-threshold workshop will prepare participants to
conceive, produce, and edit their own ethnographic
videos. The workshop presumes no video production
competency on the part of participants and begins on the
assumption of limited access to production and editing
resources. Workshop activities will involve accessible
everyday equipment, including smartphone cameras,
inexpensive digital audio recording devices, available
lighting, and free video editing software.
The one-day workshop offers a critical dissection of
contemporary ethnographic films. Facilitators will provide

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a basic and practical overview of digital video storytelling
approaches and techniques and examine the core
principles of video ethnographic practice and editing.
Participants will share their own experiences with
video-making and identify ways in which they would like to
use video in their future ethnographic enterprises. Short,
hands-on tutorials will demonstrate how participants can
use their own smartphone cameras and editing freeware
to create meaningful video ethnographies.
The workshop session will last two hours. Workshop
attendance is limited to 15 participants. Reservation
requests should be sent directly to the facilitators:
[email protected] and [email protected].
Keywords: ethnography, video, film, documentary,
methods, visual

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 Golding Address for Visual Sociology in Motion
David Kendall, Goldsmith’s University of London.
Through creative photography and moving image, I will
carefully explore evolving intersections between sensory
and embodied methods, analogue and digital technology
and critical urban research. My reflective presentation will
thoughtfully examine my extensive archive of international
visual research, active practice and project development
that carefully investigates ‘invisibility’ and ‘visibility’ in the
built environment. As a direct result, focusing on visual
themes such as: Infrastructural and architectural
development, landscape design, atmospheric pollution,
energy generation (excessive consumption and
circulation), and climatic environmental change in global
cities.
David Kendall is a British artist,
researcher and visiting fellow within
the Centre for Urban and Community
Research, Goldsmiths, University of
London. His photography and
research explore how spatial,
economic and design initiatives, as
well as participatory practices,
combine to encourage social and
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spatial interconnections or dissonance in cities. Kendall has
presented and exhibited his work at cultural and academic
institutions including: The Photographers’ Gallery, London,
Centro Cultural Manuel Gómez Morín, Santiago de
Querétaro, Mexicó, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK,
Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Germany, Tate London, UK,
Akademin Valand, Göteborg, Sweden, The British Library,
London, UK, Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal, Rotterdam Photo,
The Netherlands, University of Cambridge, UK and
University of Oxford, UK. www.david-kendall.co.uk

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 Wednesday 28 June

2.1.a Health & Safety Rights

When tradition meets modernity: Photographing workers
safety. By Ernesto Noronha. IIM Ahmedabad.
The construction industry in India is highly informalised
and the nature of work has serious implication for
occupational health hazards. Construction workers face
unsafe and unhealthy and unsafe working and living
conditions such as poor accommodation, food and
sanitation. Besides this, employees are exposed to
fatalities arising from falling objects, they dropping from
heights, getting electrocuted or structures collapsing on
them or with them. To understand the intricacies of
occupational health and safety we began photographing
the construction site in Jan 2020 and continue to do so.
Our photographs revealed that to make the worksite safer
construction companies held safety briefings, employed
safety officers and observed the safety week in March
every year. However, this was inadequate as there was a
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lack of housekeeping and inadequate use of personal
protective equipment. In fact, we also photographed
workers performing pooja (offerings to God) at the
worksite to overcome the dangers at work. Later,
photo-elicitation conversation held with workers revealed
that both modern and traditional religious practices were
required for them to feel safe at work.
Photographing workers also enabled access for serval
reasons. One, despite the proliferation of phone cameras,
the sight of professional camera made workers pose. They
believed that a professional camera provided better
quality images. Second, they belonged to marginalised
communities in terms of caste and class and photographs
put the focus on them. Third, we provided hard copies or
shared the soft copy to those photographed.
Keywords: Workers, Safety, Photographs, India

Looking out, Looking in: Pictures of Loneliness & Social

Isolation in the Popular Imagination. By Tara Milbrandt.
University of Albert, Canada.
Loneliness and social isolation have become particularly
topical since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early
2020, when public health mandates required people to
maintain physical distance from others and at the extreme,
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to shelter in place. Textual stories of loneliness and social
isolation circulating in public media and in popular culture
commonly include still photographs, drawings, or works of
art that depict ostensibly ‘lonely’ or socially isolated
human subjects. Often such figures are pictured gazing
through a window, or they are made visible through a
window to an unseen viewer from afar. These images are
common, yet are rarely made explicit in the stories
themselves. This presentation offers a comparative visual
study of pictures of loneliness and social isolation in the
popular imagination, from before and during the COVID-19
pandemic. It deploys a visual sociological imagination to
explore dominant ideas and assumptions about loneliness
and social isolation in the contemporary world that are
embedded in, and reinforced by these widely
circulating—but seldom topicalized—forms of picturing,
including ideas about gender, urbanity, and the domestic
sphere. Materials to be analyzed include visual images
from publicly available texts that have circulated within the
Canadian media-sphere—particularly from mainstream
news media articles and popular online magazines—which
are explicitly ‘about’ loneliness and/or social isolation,
appearing before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
These images are analyzed against the backdrop of current
social science research on loneliness and social isolation.

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Keywords: loneliness and social isolation, popular
imagination, visual sociological imagination

"But you don't look ill" - Exploring social stigma among

women with IBD in England. By Sylvia Kouveli.
Independent.
If seeing is believing, how do we encounter the
invisibilities of other people’s experiences? Looking
beyond the irony of conducting a visual sociology project
about something that is considered invisible, I invite you to
reflect on the things we see but ignore, as well as the
things we intentionally hide from sight.Inflammatory
bowel disease (IBD) describes a group of diseases including
Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn's Disease, two
immune-mediated chronic conditions that involve
inflammation of the gut and are characterized by periods
of remission and relapse (Ananthakrishnan, Xavier and
Podolsky, 2017; All About Crohn’s and Colitis, 2019).
Crohn’s and Colitis are considered invisible conditions
because people living with them do not have any
immediately obvious external signifiers. The physical
effects, combined with embarrassment about symptoms,
places people with IBD at risk of experiencing
disease-related stigma, as they can face public prejudice
and discrimination, which could lead to social exclusion
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and isolation (Crohn’s & Colitis UK position statement:
Access to toilets, 2021).The research project “But you
don’t look ill” explores different aspects of stigma through
the experiences of five women from different parts of
England who are living with IBD. The topic is approached
through a biographical narrative using visual and
participatory methods.
Aiming to contextualize aspects of social stigma, we
consider whether the invisibility of the condition
contributes to stigmatization and envision potential ways
of minimizing stigma. The findings are translated into an
immersive installation that places the audience behind
closed doors – both literally and figuratively – and into the
participants’ experience.
Keywords: Invisible conditions, Inflammatory Bowel
Disease, Social Stigma

Collaborative Films on Menstruation in Nepal Dignity

Without Danger. By Sara Parker. Liverpool John Moores
University.
The British Academy funded Dignity Without Danger
project engaged a variety of creative artists, film makers,
graphic designers and collaborative film makers to explore
the complexities of deeply embedded customs and beliefs
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that lead to menstrual dissemination in Nepal. In this
project, Collaborative Filmmaking, a visual, participatory
research method, was employed to train 13 participants to
create, analyse, and screen films to address a research
topic. This led to two films being produced supported by
Sara Baumann, Sara Parker and the DWD team.
‘8-day journey’ (36min) provides a detailed look into the
lives of women’s practices and traditions whilst
menstruating. The film challenges the dominant narrative
of women being ‘confined’ to the cow shed and highlights
the complexities of menstrual practices within one village
stetting.
‘Stay Away’ (15min) tells the story of a loved village
grandmother who believes she has been cursed and fallen
ill from being touched by a menstruating woman, wrestling
with notions of purity and pollution ending with a
powerful message for those still following menstrual
traditions from Nepali women themselves.
While the films offer rich, emic knowledge regarding
menstrual experiences in Nepal, the films can also serve as
authentic advocacy tools and community engagement
tools. To better understand how community-created films
impact decision making we held a National-level and
district-level film screening for policymakers and key
decision makers working on menstruation and gender
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issues. They will be shared within the wider menstruation,
academic and activist’s networks to gain further feedback
to share with the film makers.
Keywords: Collaborative Filmmaking, Activism,
Menstruation, Nepal

2.1.b Seeing Beyond the Camera

Dimensions of Ukraine: Interactive Refugee Testimonies.
By Sam Reich. Independent.
Dimensions of Ukraine: Interactive Refugee Testimonies
explores how audio-visual testimonies can be used as a
tool for advocacy, documentation, and understanding the
multi-dimensional experiences of Ukrainian refugees.
According to the UNHCR, over 8 million Ukrainians have
been recorded as refugees across Europe since the Russian
invasion began in 2022; this amounts to about 20% of the
Ukrainian population. These large figures, and indeed
those of past collective traumas, obfuscate the
multi-dimensionality of humanitarian crises and challenge
us to seek out their individual human impact.
Interactive testimonies are a relatively new and emerging
method of collecting and presenting qualitative research.
With a two-way flow of information, publics interacting
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with the technology can guide the narrative and connect
with survivor testimonies much like a live conversation.
Every external participant becomes an interviewer,
triggering responses by asking their own questions– and
accessing knowledge and storytelling that they would
personally like to understand.
Inspired by work with the USC Shoah Foundation’s
Dimensions in Testimony theatre at the Dallas Holocaust
and Human Rights Museum, this project expands on
earlier uses of interactive technology for historical
documentation by collecting testimonies of Ukrainian
refugees currently facing crisis. By highlighting individual
Ukrainian voices, this project aims to elucidate the
multi-dimensional reality of Ukrainian refugee experiences
and provides a tool for empowering and engaging
individual participants.
Believing that public mobilization is best inspired by
individual encounters with unjust realities, our team hopes
this interactive educational and research tool will
encourage international observers to become upstanders.
Keywords: Ukraine, Refugees, Interactive research tools,
Experimental methods, Visual testimonies

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Visual Essay: Seeing Nairobi Beyond Models. By Marty
Miller. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Key to visual sociological research is recognising how
processes of re-presentation occur. Recent advancements
in (Ai) algorithmic image generation aid this task my
mirroring the projecting that researchers do when entering
a new land/country/space. On the one hand, an Ai’s model
contains a massive number of images of a location, made
accessible through keyword and visual image prompts. On
the other hand, the researcher’s model implies mental
imagery and projections about a specific place. They each
contain bias over what is expected to be seen, yet, the
human researcher must locate the limits for how accurate
depictions are determined/recognised. To do so, this paper
highlights an auto-ethnographic instance of adaptation to
latent representations of what “Nairobi, Kenya”, as a
concept for humans and machines, looks like.
From the human side, I, the researcher, have never been to
Nairobi, Kenya, or Africa. Yet I have been conditioned to
perceive it from stories told by family who lived there
earlier. As I draw on this sense of place to generate an
image through the Ai’s model/database, I also recognise
being conditioned to perceive and visualise in a specific
manner. The use of my subjectively chosen image and text
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prompts condition the generated image as it emerges
through the interaction. Yet, this sequence of textual and
pictorial adjustments leaves a data trail to evidence
doubly-situated assumptions about Nairobi. This trail is
displayed to propose the practical, medium-reflexive
benefits of algorithmic image generation needed to see
beyond both models.
Keywords: algorithmic image generation, implicit bias,
autoethnography, Kenya

Camera constellations and navigational images. By Asko

Lehmuskallio. Tampere University.
Novel visual technologies allowing users to move within
images, to layer various forms of information, or to stitch
seemingly disparate elements together have played a part
in rethinking the role of photographic representations for
knowledge production. Post-photography, expanded
photography and the networked image are some of the
terms with which these changes are discussed. While
related work tends to link these developments to camera
obscurae, to work on optics, chemistry, Renaissance
perspective and modes of digital computation, there has
been less interest in the role of techniques for navigation
for an understanding of photographies .

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Nevertheless, with increasing automation of photographic
imaging, navigation has become an evident element of
photographies, be it in drone imaging, satellite imaging, or
when automatically geotagging vacation photographs
using GPS connections to do so. But techniques of
navigation remain important for other kinds of
photographies too.
Drawing on literature on wayfaring and a praxeological
turn in visual and media studies, this contribution suggests
that a focus on navigational techniques, of which many
have been developed for seafaring, are useful for
understanding photographies today. Empirically, the paper
will focus particularly on selected aspects of the
Greenwich observatory, the quest to determine longitude
on sea, as well the emergence of satellite imaging in order
to point to crucial changes in the ability to situate oneself
within a broader representational framework. These
changes have fundamentally altered the interrelations
between the local and the global.
Keywords: cameras, photographies, navigation, cultural
techniques, visual culture

This Is Not a Protest. By Claire Reardon. DePaul University.

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“This Is Not a Protest” follows a group of protesters who
frequent an abortion clinic in Aurora Illinois. The film
begins with the diligent set-up process of the protesters,
capturing their promptness that coincides with the clinic’s
surgery hours. Protesters are seen engaging in various
actions that involve praying, sign holding, and sidewalk
counseling. All three roles are distinct and rarely overlap,
however, the group deems the same importance to each
towards their overall goal. Protesters insist that what they
are doing is not protesting, however, the group displays
widely accepted acts of protesting. Collective success can
differ slightly across individual subjects, yet they all seek
individual moral change over institutional. Seen in
interviews, a few subjects describe the different roles they
play, the emotions the feel, and the common goal they
share throughout the process. Protesting aside, each the
individuals agree that the comradery and community that
come with this act is one of the main benefits.
Keywords: protest, abortion clinic, community

2.2.a Education
The Art of Parenting: A Visual Case-Study from Nepal. By
Paola Tine. The University of Adelaide.

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Through the means of visual investigation (drawings
realised in gouache, acrylic, oil sticks and watercolours), in
this presentation I examine parent-child relationships
among middle-class families in Bhaktapur, Nepal. I draw
from 15 months of ethnographic research in 2018-2019,
where I explored the making of a modern domestic
dharma through the negotiation of social roles and
relationships in the pursuit of an idealised notion of
well-being in a context of accelerated social change. By
experimenting with ‘non finito’, and using strong colours
that combine primary and complementary shades, I show
how when colliding aspirations cause conflict, this is often
dealt with through avoidance. Throughout the
development of my argument, I discuss how the images
become progressively abstracted. This reflects the
structure of academic papers where we first introduce the
ethnographic material, the main people and their stories,
and then we move on to analyse the data. By examining
personal narratives of conflict and adjustment through the
theoretical lens of Husserlian ‘intersubjectivity’ and the
notion of ‘conversation’ by Schutz, I demonstrate here
visually that through inter-personal conversations social
actors actively work to coordinate with one another to
attune their existential dimensions.
Keywords: art, family, Nepal, parenting

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Queering Visual Methods in the Classroom: A Strategy of
Peace Pedagogy. By Molly Merryman. Kent State
University.
Visual methods provide undergraduate and graduate
students with powerful tools to understand and explore
social subjects, an approach that is particularly valuable in
Peace education. This presentation will explore the
integration of visual methods (including photovoice, photo
elicitation, filmic sociology, documentary photography and
augmented reality) into courses organized around themes
of positive peace and social justice. Of particular interest
will be the value visual methodologies provide in
discovering and understanding queer subjects and queer
students and the importance of team and interdisciplinary
teaching.
Keywords: queer methods, intersectional scholarship,
visual methods, pedagogy, applied research

The Storied Experiences of Teachers of Color through

Photovoice. By Laura Porterfield Rutgers
University-Newark, and Lynnette Mawhinney, Rutgers
University-Newark.

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This study seeks to illuminate how United States teachers
of color make sense of their experiences in the classroom,
their roles as educators, and their personal and
professional identities in the field of education. Working
within the context of an increasingly non-white student
body but an overwhelmingly white teaching force,
teachers of color often endure dehumanizing experiences
that lead to demoralization and attrition, even as they
strive to serve as agents of change (US Department of
Education, 2016).
This project aims to empower teachers of color through
photovoice to make sense of their experiences in
educational systems and the ways in which their identities
inform everyday practices (Wang & Burris, 1997). Teachers
of color from across the professional lifespan (e.g. novice =
0-5 years, mid-career = 6-10 years; veteran = 11+ years)
were recruited to participate. Using photovoice as a
guiding methodology, participants constructed visual
counternarratives that challenged and decentralized
dominant notions of teachers, students, and educational
practice (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) around four questions:
(1) What does it mean to be a teacher of color?; (2) What
fulfills you as a teacher of color?; (3) What are some
challenges to achieving your professional goals?; and (4)
What sustains you in teaching? This presentation will

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highlight the photographic responses from the first cohort
of 8 participants to understand how they see themselves
and their work as teachers. We use their images as a lever
to inform larger educational, social, and political endeavors
to recruit and retain US teachers of color.
Keywords: teachers of color, photovoice, storied
experiences

Narratives of Black Life – College Student Success Stories.

By Theresa White. California State University, Northridge.
The California State University (CSU) is the nation's largest
and most diverse four-year public university system. Yet
the CSU faces the challenge of recruiting, retaining, and
graduating Black students. In the fall of 2021, the
university provided funding to create a Black Scholars
Matter (BSM) Program---a creative and collaborative
enterprise that involved university community partners, as
well as partnerships with three high schools from three
geographica locations in Los Angeles. The project
established a new pipeline of students of African descent,
supports a diverse culture of academic success and aims to
increase enrollment and retention of Black students at
CSUN. BSM focuses on advancing a culture of inclusive

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excellence; closing student equity gaps, while improving
retention and graduation rates.
Black Scholars Matter (BSM) is a transformative,
tuition-free college program aimed toward Scholars of
African descent with the goal of inspiring Black Excellence
by connecting students to essential resources, providing
academic and career support, and promoting community
engagement. The program takes a holistic approach to
educating the “whole” person, and providing support that
aligns with student’s mental, intellectual, physical, and
spiritual well-being.
Utilizing photography and videography as tools for
studying their social reality, the project aims to create a
visual, digital oral history (including interviews and focus
groups) to document the journey of the first cohort of
freshman students in the BSM Program. The project will
amplify student voices and highlight a model of success
which illuminates best practices that help African/Black
students succeed.
Keywords: Black, Students, Storytelling

2.2.b Workshop
Sociology of Scientific Presentation: The BBC Model and
New Formats for Science Education. By Wesley Shrum and
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Mark Schafer, Louisiana State University and Matthew
Harsh, California Polytechnic State University.
The purpose of this workshop is to develop a new proposal
for sociological films depicting scientific research and its
projects. During one pandemic summer, the International
Science Council and British Broadcasting Corporation
entered into a collaboration to produce fifteen movies for
wide public distribution on their web platforms. Several
IVSA members were involved in the production and first
screenings of the series, entering into a lively debate over
the extent to which a template had been used and the
degree to which the process of scientific research and its
outcomes could be reliably depicted in this format. The
debate is summarized here and a new platform for
scientific videos will be discussed and debated. Examples
of films from both the BBC project and new forms will be
presented. The proposal to be discussed will involve the
International Science Council, IVSA and the Ethnografilm
festival in Paris.
Keywords: sociology of science, video distribution, film
templates

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2.3.a Cultural, Artistic, & Popular Representations
Sacred Representations: From Religious Mystery to Mirror
Of A Popular Universe. By Matteo Giuseppe Romanato.
Independent.
The spread of monotheism in the Western world raised the
problem of the image of a new God. After a first period of
"Clash of the Gods" on the battlefield of representation,
Christianity took over pagan iconography and
re-semanticized its images for the use of a population that
still recognized a sacred value in icons.
This long-term connection between religion and icons
remained stable until the Protestant Reformation, which,
in half of Europe, could eradicate the veneration of images
by replacing it with the cult of the word. However, the
Counter-Reformation revived sacred representations,
favouring a dissemination among the less educated
classes. Despite an initial rigour about figurative rules, a
"vision through the heart" of the sacred mysteries soon
spread in order to make the aesthetic and religious
experience more human and participatory. Yet, Catholic
church failed to keep under control a bottom-up way of

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production and use of images, leaving that to a "silent
reversal".
Hence the tradition of sacred representations emerges in
the form of processions but, above all, as the Neapolitan
"presepio", which shows all its nature of popular creation,
reproducing not only sacred stories but also contemporary
portraits that, sometimes, overlook the religious theme.
Nowadays, such visions and ritual actions compose
anachronisms, social criticism, news but also earthly
expectations. An intense social self-portrait is therefore
disguised as a sacred celebration, which, also thanks to the
digital revolution of social media, can resist the erosion of
its symbolic forms by techno-science and manifest a
renewed vitality.
Keywords: Crib, Sacred Representations, Silent Reversal,
Popular Art

Whitewashing: Skin and Clay. By Teri Frame. University of

Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Whitewashing: Skin and Clay explores the notion,
performance, and representation of whiteness. The
concept that there is a race of people who are white
emerged within the European imagination during the
Renaissance, developed throughout the colonial period,
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and is still pervasive within contemporary thought. Upon
unearthing marble statues of classical antiquity,
Renaissance proto-archeologists were intrigued with what
they thought of as white statuary, despite evidence that it
was once covered in polychrome. Throughout the
following centuries, marble and porcelain replicas of such
works were left white. This centuries-long whitewashing of
representational art was synonymous with skin-whitening
trends popularized within the Elizabethan Era and
remaining prominent for centuries. As the concept of
purity and its association with whiteness emerged during
the Enlightenment, so did the race among European
nations for the recipe for porcelain. A completely white
clay body, free from iron, it quickly became a standard
material with which to convey the human form and
represent “ideal” white skin. European and U.S.
aristocracy, military, and religious leaders, along with
representations of the Madonna and Child, were painted
white in life and art respectively, to convey their leisure
class status, their “superiority” to black and brown people,
and to justify imperialism, colonialism and slavery.
Keywords: Racialization, Representation, Whitewashing,
Art History

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Getting Un-Lost at Home: The Use of Experimental
Cinematic Ethno-Fiction to Understand the Making of
Intelligible Life in Quarantine. By Greg Scott. DePaul
University.
In March 2020, the world began shrinking rapidly to the
size of our homes as millions of humans across the planet
went into some form of lockdown or quarantine in
response to the COVID-19 pandemic. During confinement,
most of us changed the way we used many of the physical
spaces in our homes. Almost overnight, our private
residential spaces underwent considerable disruption as
they absorbed all sorts of activities that used to happen
outside the home, such as working, attending school,
shopping, worshipping with others, exercising, and
socializing. Employing an arts-based performance
methodology, this project examines how people in
different countries experienced this transformation of
their daily activity spaces, or “the local areas within which
people move or travel during the course of their daily
activities” (Sherman et al., 2005: 24) while also attempting
to understand how humans in lockdown altered their
environments to create a continuous and predictable daily
existence. To explore the complexities of affective change
in relation to the domestic spaces we have reconfigured
and occupied during isolation, I use self-made home tour

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videos, video-recorded interviews, and
“ethno-dramatizations,” a form of “reality theatre” in
which nonfiction materials about human social life are
translated into an artistic expression, in this case
experimental documentary cinema.
Keywords: covid-19, quarantine, lockdown, domestic
space, ethno-fiction, video ethnography, activity spaces,
havoc and containment, Simmel

The films of Mantas Kvedaravičius: from observational

cinema to sensory ethnography. By Narius Kairys.
Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre.
In recent years one can observe a certain shift in the
ethnographic filmmaking as a number of anthropologists
including Véréna Paravel, Pacho Velez, Joshua Bonnetta,
and Stephanie Spray among others, have been employing
in their ethnographic films the strategies of filmmaking
traditionally associated with fiction film. These efforts
demonstrate the redundancy of understanding of an
ethnographic film as a scientific work or yet as a purely
artistic activity and call for the reconceptualization of
ethnographic filmmaking. In my paper I further advance
the ongoing debate on the status of ethnographic
filmmaking by taking as a case study the work of

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Lithuanian anthropologist-turned-filmmaker Mantas
Kvedaravičius (1976-2022): “Barzakh” (2011), “Mariupol”
(2016), “Parthenon” (2019), “Prologos” (2022), and
“Mariupol 2” (2022), Featuring diverse creative strategies
associated with observational cinema, sensory
ethnography and fiction film, Kvedaravičius’s films suggest
the importance of the interdisciplinary interaction
between art and anthropology and question the notion of
“objective reality” on screen, thus inviting us to focus our
attention not on what ethnographic film was but what it
has become.
Keywords: Mantas Kvedaravičius, Observational cinema,
Sensory ethnography, Ukraine

2.3.b Colonial Relations and Resistance

Reading and rereading colonial statues in the spaces of
Higher Education. By Bridget Horner. University of
KwaZulu-Natal.
The Cecil Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town
[UCT] was the centre of a protest that sparked worldwide
attention in 2015. The figure was symbolic of an
oppressive past, and the call [#rhodesmustfall] for its
removal led to a movement to ‘decolonise’ education.
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Around the same time, the statue of King George V at
another university in South Africa was defaced and bore a
banner that read ‘end white privilege’. UCT Management
agreed to remove the Rhodes statue, unlike the King
Goerge V statue that has remained defaced overlooking
the campus.
Statues and memorials on campus once held significance
for an audience of predominately white male students and
staff; now reread by marginalised students from
disadvantaged communities. The contested readings of
statues emerged from a PhD study utilising visual
methodology and co-produced photographs with students
in higher education (HE) spaces.
The findings identified three dualisms. The first dualism
was space-society, wherein spaces and objects contribute
to reproducing past injustices; the second was mind-body
dualism, wherein what students know influences how they
may act within the HE space. Thirdly the duality of past
and present shapes students' knowledge and actions
within the HE context. Barads Agential Realism captures
the entanglement of these dualisms inside and outside the
student, shaping how they interact with their
environment, simultaneously enabling and limiting them.
The paper argues that to address a decolonised education,

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and one needs to think beyond the epistemic content to
the environment and the artefacts therein.
Keywords: higher education, statues, students, decolonial,
entanglement

Decolonizing Visual Ethics: From the Standpoint of South

Korea. By Eunjung Kim, Semyung University and Chiay
Yang, Freelance.
This study focuses on South Korea’s unique national
position in which it has experienced both imperial and
colonial positions in a cultural context. During the
modernization process after the Japanese colonial period,
South Korea unilaterally accepted the cultural products of
Western society represented by the United States. In
recent years, South Korea is referred to as “Hallyu(Korean
Wave)” in the context of the rapid-growing media industry
and is becoming a significant content supplier.
Furthermore, by strategically targeting Asian countries to
spread South Korean culture, the country shares a critical
mind with first-world countries, particularly those in an
imperial position. In this context, South Korea can be
considered in (sub)empire position.
On the other hand, there are still unresolved issues in the
victim’s position. Comfort women issue is one of the
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representative examples. Therefore, we should question
whether the current visual ethics are appropriate for
complex South Korean cultural context studies. Since the
existing Code of Ethics, which was created around the
Western world in the first world, presupposes their views,
it may be difficult to successfully support research that
requires multiple perspectives like South Korea. Thus,
while highlighting South Korea’s position on the world’s
cultural topography, this study is intended to explore visual
ethics that are needed when studying complicated cultural
situations.
Keywords: "decolonization", "visual ethics",
"representation"

Filmmaking as a research tool: challenging the legacy of

the colonial-industrial school through visualising funds of
knowledge in craft and farming communities in West
Africa. By Karen Wells. Birkbeck, University of London.
This paper draws on a two-year research project that used
visual methods including filmmaking to investigate the
funds of knowledge embedded in craft and farming
communities in rural West Africa. Central to the research
design is the assumption that the colonial-industrial form
of the school can be challenged by valuing the knowledge

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embedded in everyday life in craft and farming
communities and scaffolding these concrete forms of
knowledge to the conceptual knowledge of science, maths,
technology, and design curriculums. The primary method
of data collection were videos and photographs taken by
the project field researcher. This data was then used as the
starting point for producing a film, ‘Weaving Knowledge’
which was screened at community events in villages in
Ghana, Senegal and Togo and in Accra, Dakar, and Lomé .
The purpose of the film was to make visible the possible
value of local funds of knowledge and technology for the
learning of science, maths, design, and engineering. To
accomplish this we deployed three strategies: engaging
parents and children in discussion about the significance of
their activities as funds of knowledge and choosing what
scenes to reproduce for the film; representing these
activities in a film with high production values and a
compelling visual narrative to encourage the spectator to
consider what funds of knowledge are embedded in these
practices; screening these films in the research sites in
community discussions. The success of these methods
supports the use of filmmaking for data-gathering and as a
form of data analysis.
Keywords: filmmaking as research, funds of knowledge,
STEM learning, rural West Africa
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Breaking the frame: Understanding the dynamics of rural
women’s lives in Northern Nigeria. By Barbara
Crossouard, University of Sussex; Máiréad Dunne,
University of Sussex and Dauda Moses, Modibbo Adama
University of Technology.
In this paper, we present a participatory visual research
study focusing on the dynamics of work and education for
young women in rural Northern Nigeria. This research
involved a series of six participatory workshops using a
range of visual methods (drawings, photo-voice,
cellphilms, etc.) as well as individual life history interviews.
It involved two groups of fourteen women from two
different local contexts, one that was predominantly
Muslim and the other largely Christian. The study was
initiated to explore the complexities of the lives and
livelihoods of women in the majority world and to point to
the gendered silences, absences and dualisms in the ways
these have been constructed.
These framing discourses typically assume a Western
imaginary which plots a linear trajectory from childhood to
adulthood, incorporating a staged progression from school
to work, as well as normalising particular imaginaries of
marriage and childbearing. Such narratives of modernity
are enshrined in international measures of development
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whose statistical representations work as technologies of
power that intensify the dualisms intrinsic to the western
episteme. Significantly, an effect of these discourses is to
evacuate the specific and divergent contours of the
everyday lives of rural Nigerian women. In contrast, our
discussion renders visible the complex embodied and
affective materialities of the social worlds of the
co-researcher participants. Their multi-layered accounts of
how they navigated education, work and domestic
responsibilities, including marriage and child-bearing, ran
counter to the clipped and reductive framing of dominant
development discourses.
Keywords: participatory visual methodologies, rural
Nigeria, gender, work, education

2.4.a Creativity in Social Practices and Research

Arts as a peacebuilding ‘field’: an ethnographical case
study of ‘Mobile Arts for Peace’ in Kyrgyzstan'. By Anna
Smirnova. University of Lincoln.
I will present my PhD research findings in the framework of
the international multi-disciplinary project ‘Mobile Arts for
Peace: Informing the National Curriculum and Youth Policy
for Peacebuilding in Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, Indonesia, and
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Nepal’ (MAP). The MAP aims to provide a comparative
approach to the use of interdisciplinary arts-based
research methods for peacebuilding for/with young people
to address global challenges and create structures and
modes of communication between youth and
policymakers locally and globally.
In my study, I investigate ‘What’, ‘How’, and ‘Why’
arts-based research and interventions contribute to the
design, delivery, and evaluation of peacebuilding curricula
in diverse social, political, and cultural contexts. The
practice-as-research element of the PhD is research
support to the Kyrgyzstan team of MAP to analyse their
practical activities in adapting cultural forms and artistic
approaches for peacebuilding and developing
recommendations about effective and sustainable ways of
engaging youth in conflict resolution and decision-making.
The PhD framework has been shaped by social theories,
first of all, sociology of culture of Bourdieu,
critical/Freirean pedagogy, and methodology of
participatory arts (emancipatory ideas of the ‘Theatre of
the Oppressed’ by Boal and ‘social turn’ in contemporary
arts, as analysed by Bishop). The case study is
ethnographically rooted through multiple data sources. I
will discuss visual data, collected both by myself during
participant-observations and an engagement at the
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research site, and by co-researchers, Kyrgyz youth, within
their PhotoVoice and digital storytelling projects about
concerning them problems. Virtual exhibition will present
young people's artworks and be accomplished by their
storytelling.
Keywords: participatory arts-based methods,
peacebuilding, ethnographical case study, Kyrgyzstan

Stitching Stories: Storywork and Visual Storytelling in

Quilts of the Black Atlantic. By Chinelo L. Njaka.
Goldsmiths College, University of London.
The paper explores the use of storywork methodologies in
the relational comparison of Black quilts and quilting
practices in the United Kingdom and United States.
Despite quilts being viewed in both nations as a form of
gendered cultural production that reflects the historical
periods in which they were made, quilts by Black makers
are vastly underrepresented and Euro-Western quilt
literature largely excludes Black quilters' rich and
often-marginalised stories and narratives. Concurrently,
quilting as a cultural practice is under-researched as a
means of exploring craftship, artistic expression,
documentation, and storytelling across generations within
the Black Atlantic diaspora. This paper argues that quilts

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created by Black makers are significant forms of visual and
material culture that serve as powerful vessels for
storytelling and understanding socio-cultural history and
contemporary society throughout the Black Atlantic.
Drawing from Black feminist and womanist perspectives,
the paper develops an experimental visual storywork
framework to explore underrepresented Black British and
Black US American quilts and quilting communities from
1945 to the present. Storywork, a theoretical and
methodological framing that centres the making, telling,
and understanding of stories, is used to identify
connections between the story, the teller, and the
‘listener-as-viewer.’ Through this research, the paper
examines how storywork bridges these connections, as
well as links each storyteller's experiences with
her/his/their life experiences and visual creative practices.
This experimental approach provides an affirming lens
through which to explore the stories and meanings that
are created and lived through quilts and visual creative
practices, and positions Black makers as agents of their
own cultures and societies. The relational comparative
lens also allows for the British and US American quilts to
be put in conversation with one another, creating space to
understand similarities, divergences, and interactions
among quilters connected within the Black Atlantic.
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Keywords: Storywork, Quilting, Black Atlantic, Visual
Storytelling
CCSI in Rural and Peripheral Areas: A view from the
Azores. By Alexandra Baixinho. CHAM, University of the
Azores/UNova.
What are the main challenges for cultural and
creativity-led development in peripheral EU regions?
Which local policies foster creative ecosystems on islands?
Drawing on a place-based engagement with key Azorean
stakeholders and initiatives this paper presents a critical
view on the current local-global CCSI dynamics on the
island of São Miguel, which interweave artistic and
research practices, heritage and tourism, sustainability and
innovation, transdisciplinary dialogues and multiple
mobilities. The potential benefits and impacts of such
regenerative approaches are discussed and incorporated in
the visual sociologist’s own analytic and creative practices.
Keywords: Cultural and Creative Sectors and
Industries(CCSI), Non-urban and peripheral areas, Azores,
Visual Essay

We'll see (on verra bien). By Vincent Delbos. Centre Pierre

Naville, University of Evry, Paris Saclay.

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In France, artistic self-production reveals a new trend of
gray areas between work and passion, amateur and
professional, volunteering and employment. The
phenomenon is also contemporary with new forms of
“hope-labour”. This observation leads us to a
contradiction: how can work be both a source of
emancipation and dependence? To answer this question,
we must link the macroeconomic analysis to a more
subjective approach. This is why a co-constructed film was
developed in the social-occupied cinema "La Clef", in Paris.
Keywords: art, cinema, work, DIY, transidentity

2.4.b Contesting Hegemonic Culture

The visuality of dissent against global air transport: A
historical and comparative approach. By Alexander Araya
López. Universität Potsdam.
Acts of dissent are inherently visual. With the objective of
influencing societal processes of opinion-formation and
decision-making, dissenting citizens produce images that
are seductive or shocking, as part of their strategy to
communicate their political cause to the global public and
to ‘visually represent the conflict’ to challenge dominant
narratives about a given social issue. In relation to the air
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transport industry, these dominant narratives are linked to
ideas such as freedom, economic growth/job creation, or
social status through leisure and tourism. However, both
airports and airlines have been the target of acts of dissent
for decades, with dissenting citizens highlighting the
negative impacts of the air transport industry (i.e.
excessive aircraft noise, land grabbing and growing CO2
and non-CO2 emissions in the context of the climate
crisis). This paper explores the visuality of these historical
and contemporary airport conflicts, in which
airports/airlines are reframed as ‘destructive’, ‘antisocial’
or ‘unnecessary’ (at least in Europe). This theoretical,
visual and qualitative analysis includes four contemporary
airport conflicts in Europe, namely: Schiphol Airport in the
Netherlands, Berlin Airport in Germany, El Prat Airport in
Spain and Bristol Airport in the United Kingdom. A
world-system perspective has also been included to
emphasize the complexity of both the air transport
industry and the dissent against it, with references to
other airport conflicts in Latin America, Asia or Africa. It is
expected that airport conflicts will increase in the future as
the climate crisis worsens, while alternative/subaltern
visual narratives about airports/airlines continue to gain
force.

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Keywords: airports, greenwashing, dissent, climate
change, media narratives, air transport, social justice

From Hollywood films to Nairobi restaurants: The chop

suey letterform as hegemonic regimes of representation
of global visual Chineseness. By Yu Li. Loyola Marymount
University.
Lettering styles mimicking the brushstrokes of Chinese
calligraphy, known collectively as the chop suey letterform,
have featured prominently in the construction of global
visual Chineseness since the late 19th century (The Inland
Printer, 1918; Shaw, 2008). From Hollywood films of the
1930s to restaurant menus in today’s Nairobi (Li, 2019), its
stereotypical sharp wedges readily index the Chinese
ethnocultural identity in the semiotic landscapes of the
world. The lettering style, however, has been called out as
“racist”, igniting debates over its socio-aesthetic values
and cultural-political impacts against the backdrop of
anti-AAPI-hate discourse in the US (Yang, 2012; Quito,
2021).
This study offers a comprehensive critique of the chop
suey letterform as hegemonic regimes of representation
(Londoño, 2015; Siapera, 2010; Hall, 1997; Foucault, 1977)
by problematizing its meaning creation and

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enregisterment in the Western dominant global
marketplace. Building on metapragmatic analyses of its
social meaning specifically (e.g., Meletis, 2021) and of
ethnic type mimicry in general (e.g., Sutherland, 2015), it
argues that the creation of the chop suey letterform in the
1880s US and its global spread since then were
profit-driven racialization of the Chinese and
commodification of their ethno-cultural identity. Drawing
on visual data encompassing cultural products (film
posters, book covers, sheet music covers) and commercial
devices (business name signs, advertisements, menus,
matchbooks), it demonstrates how the chop suey
letterform served to manufacture and maintain hegemonic
regimes of representation that exoticize and otherize the
Chinese and their cultures in the interest of a Western
dominant ideology.
Keywords: chop suey letterform, typographic ideology,
regimes of representation, social semiotics

Building actions through participatory visual methods:

working with women in Northern Nigeria. By Dauda
Moses, Modibbo Adama University; Máiréad Dunne;
University of Sussex and Barbara Crossouard, University of
Sussex.

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This paper discusses the use of participatory visual
methods with two groups of young women in two distinct
(Muslim and Christian) communities in rural Northern
Nigeria. It focuses both on methodological issues related
to the use of visual methods and the substantive concerns
raised by the co-researcher participants in the research.
Following brief depictions of the context we trace how
these young women participated together with their
experiences in the sequential phases of the research that
led them to having dialogue with their community leaders
and pointing to areas for social change that had been of
serious concern to them.
Importantly the paper also illuminates the situated
complexities of the lives of the co-researcher participants.
These provide strong depictions of the gendered
assumptions including culture and beliefs that structure
their lives and the ways they understand and navigate the
local social conditions to manage, education, paid work
and their domestic and family lives. Finally, we reflect on
the social dynamics within the study to consider the
potential and limitations of participatory visual
methodologies for enabling voice and for social change.

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Keywords: Participatory method, gender, Nigeria,
education, work

Screening: The Wind of Swabia by Corrado Punzi

What is life like in a southern Italian city, nestled between
two of Europe’s largest industrial plants: a coal fired power
plant and a petrochemical plant? What is left of the
promises of progress and development? Two farmers living
and working under the two plants and a somewhat
fleeting environmentalist scuba diver try to prove the
economic and health damage inflicted by the facilities. The
press officer of the power plant, however, tells a
completely different story. While the inhabitants of the city
attend cultural and sporting events funded by the
industries, truth and justice remain suspended and
unattainable, like in a Kafkaesque trial.

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 Thursday 29 June

3.1.a Ethics Think Tank

Ernesto Noronha, Sapana Basnet, Sara Parker, Ratan Kumar
Roy, & Dev Nath Pathak Han Sang Kim, Eunjung Kim, &
Chiay Yang (South Korea), Teri L. Frame (North America),
Gaby David (Spanish Language-based regional unit /
French language-based regional unit), and Tricia Ong
(Australia) .
In the Ethics Think Tank session at the last year’s IVSA
annual meeting, there was a considerable push for an
official table to continue the discussion on the issues of
how to renovate and ‘decolonize’ visual ethics. The IVSA
acknowledges such demands from members and
conference participants. Our 2023 Ethics Think Tank is a
platform for facilitating and implementing such productive
conversations within regional boundaries and, thereby, at
the transregional and global levels.

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3.1.b Theory and Methods
We are altogether the video camera. Methodological
reflections on the documentary film "Sciences beyond the
wall". By Priya Ange. EHESS.
This paper engages a methodological reflection on a
documentary film resulting from a Participatory Research
Action workshop. It questions the place of the video
camera during the workshop. For the anthropologist, I am,
using audiovisual tools, means to conduct an ethnographic
type of investigation. But from the perspective of the
participants, who are also researchers meeting together to
reflect on their practices, the use of the video camera
totally meant something else. Here, the video camera is
both the audiovisual recording device guaranteeing the
production of knowledge and its restitution afterwards. It
allows immersive and moving filming too, placing the
camerawoman fully into the action as a participant of the
interactive workshops. The paper examines also how the
documentary film “Sciences beyond the wall” was
co-produced during the shooting, the script writing, the
video editing, and the screening.
The presentation will thus reflect on how the video camera
became a tool to create intersubjectivity, collective
creativity, and scientific experimentation during the whole

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process of realizing the film. Therefore, the paper invites to
see beyond the dualism of the situation and leads to the
question of how this documentary is a form of
participatory video. Because, according to Vinent Petit and
Loïc Colin (2009), participatory video "implies breaking
down the barriers between the different groups involved
in the production of a video, by allowing everyone to
participate in the different stages of the process
(conception, realization, dissemination), so that the
boundaries between producers, actors and viewers
become blurred or overlap".
Keywords: -participatory video, -methodology,
-ethnography, -intersubjectivity

Dancing to the Challenge: Gaining an Embodied

Understanding of the Practice of Producing Video Dance
Content for TikTok. By Bettine Josties. The New School for
Social Research.
I propose a video-app-based work-in-progress
presentation on my hybrid ethnographic research on the
practice of producing video dance content for TikTok.
TikTok is a video-sharing app that became famous for short
dance videos “going viral” on it: Users from all over the
world create and post videos of themselves performing

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one and the same short choreography to one and the
same short snippet of a song on TikTok. As a doctoral
student in Sociology, I look at this practice from a political
economy perspective. I ask how TikTok’s business model
relates to its users’ practice of producing video dance
content for it and whether this practice can be understood
as a form of labor. To study this, I conduct observations
and analyze visual content on TikTok. Apart from that, I
also meet and accompany dance content creators in their
practice and look at their and other people’s content with
them. In addition, I produce video dance content for
TikTok, either together with my interlocutors or alone.
The goal of my content production is, on the one hand, to
gain an embodied understanding of what participating in
TikTok’s dance economy feels like and, on the other hand,
to explore the political and aesthetic boundaries of what
TikTok as an economic sphere incites and allows for,
including its subversive potential. In my presentation, I will
reflect on and discuss my video-app-based hybrid
ethnographic research practice as a particular way of doing
visual sociology, present the first findings, and meditate on
the challenges and illuminations it brings about.
Keywords: Video-App Ethnography, Hybrid Ethnography,
Arts-Based Ethnography, Visual Content Analysis, TikTok
Aesthetics, Screen Dance, Political Economy, Labor
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Leave the world a better place. By Jon Prosser. University
of Durham.
This paper concerns how the notion of dualism in the
sense that for duelists two opposites, for example ‘good’
and ‘evil’, takes priority over and contrasts with both
monism theory, which is the theory that there is only one
fundamental kind, or category and with pluralism, which is
the view that there are many kinds or categories, can
potentially impact positively on the world.
Dualist are found in all human cultures, although little is
known about how these beliefs influence thought and
behavior in everyday life. This paper promotes the notion
that espousing a dualist philosophy can have important
positive real-life consequences.
I am by nature a dualist. As someone who has made a
career of applying dualism to my private and professional
life spanning 75 years, I will draw my experiences to
illustrate how dualism can aide my ambition to ‘leave the
world a better place’. Hence this presentation provides a
personal reflection on key issues and concerns associated
with dualism the themes important to me, all of which
carry visual theme: quantitative v qualitative, local v

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global, powerful v powerless, neurotypical v
neurodivergent.
Keywords: Dualism, Visual, Methods

3.2.a Other ways of knowing

Using Photovoice and Participatory Mapping in
Community Based Participatory Research with Youth with
Physical, Sensory and Learning Disabilities in Bangladesh
and Kenya. By Sapana Basnet. Sightsavers.
Visual methods are powerful participatory research tools
to engage and centralise the voices of marginalised
populations by providing accurate representation of their
lived experiences while producing knowledge. While
academics and advocates of visual research methods
emphasise the right of all people to be actively involved as
researchers in matters relevant to their lives, most
traditional participatory research methods are often
inaccessible to people with sensory impairment and with
learning disabilities.This paper presents learnings from
applying photovoice and participatory mapping using
Geographic Information System (GIS) in an inclusive
community based participatory research (CBPR) to explore

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livelihood experiences, aspirations, and challenges of
youth with disabilities in Bangladesh and Kenya.
The paper highlights strengths of using photovoice and GIS
mapping in inclusive CBPR as: capturing nuanced
experiences of youth different types of disabilities and
their journey as researchers; providing accessible data
collection tools for peer researchers with sensory and
learning disabilities; capturing contextual barriers and
enablers; fostering safe space for meaningful participation
and critical dialogues with peer researchers and
stakeholders; strengthened engagement and ownership of
advocacy actions because of visual evidences; and
ensuring more equitable power relations amongst peer
researchers with different types of disabilities and with
academic researchers.
We recommend using sign language interpreters as peer
researcher from research design phase; adapting the
tools/system used for photography and participatory
mapping to suit the needs of people with sensory and
learning disabilities; and including peer researchers with
different disability during research methods training
development to ensure their specific needs are addressed
collectively.

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Keywords: Disability Inclusive Participatory Research,
Accessible Research Methods, Photovoice, Participatory
Mapping

Visionary plants vs experts. By Orsolya Bajusz.

Tokaj-Hegyalja Egyetem.
Through the unfolding of the conflict between visionary
plants and experts (psychologists), I explore the credibility
crisis of science mediators and analyse different modes of
knowledge transmission: their respective ideological
embeddedness and their conflicts, especially focusing on
the status of subjective, visionary knowledge. Plants, by
definition, do not express themselves as ‘experts’, with a
scientific discourse based on facts and data. These are
visionary plants, hence what’s at stake is the status of
vision as valid knowledge, which is contingent on whether
these plants are accepted as actants. According to the
‘plant teacher’ discourse through the plants gods and
spirits connect to our world. Opposing this, the discourse
of psychology focuses on drug use, and seeks to steer
psychedelics and their users back into the framework of
the medicalization narrative, bringing elements of nature,
and the humans and non-humans allied with them under
the supervision of ‘expert’ psychotherapists.Through
framing (articles) and visual framing (artworks and
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therapeutic tools) I explore associations, moral evaluations
and actors around issues of expertise and knowledge
hierarchy pertaining to contemporary ayahuasca and DMT
use. In my conclusions, I speculate how such a
constellation of agency between humans and nonhumans
shapes mode of human expertise which can pertain to
such visionary images, and how would such expertise
shape science communication, tactical media, and overall
what it means to take images seriously.
Keywords: science communication, epistemic hierarchy,
framing, visual framing, expertise

The Empathetic Lens: Documenting Resistance and the

role of the Protest Photographer. By Marziya
Mohammedali. Edith Cowan University.
Contemporary resistance movements are often marked by
a flood of imagery, particularly given the immediacy with
which pressing events such as protest actions are
photographed, recorded, streamed and shared on social
media platforms. Distinct in style and presentation from
conventional press photography around protest actions,
many of these images are created by people who are
themselves involved in protest, with the photographer
playing multiple roles as activist, interpreter, participant,

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and witness. These visuals form a body of resistance that
subverts conventional narratives and provides a look at
how marginalised communities enact dissent through their
relationships with each other, photographers, and the
spaces around them.
As bell hooks (1991) notes, “The ability to be empathetic is
rooted in our capacity to imagine… to enter realms of the
unknown with no will to colonize or possess.” In this
project, I draw on empathy as the means through which
we can recognise the decolonial, feminist and queer
potential of protest photography, and what it means to
develop a practice that is founded on collaboration, rather
than extraction (Aushana & Pixley, 2020). I explore the
development of a model of photography I refer to as the
Empathetic Lens, through an autotheoretical approach
that combines an ongoing practice as a protest
photographer, with reflections on identity, photography
and protest. I present that these explorations may allow us
to truly see and hear those who are, as Arundhati Roy
(2004) describes, “the deliberately silenced, or the
preferably unheard”, and imagine a more just future.
Keywords: protest, photography, empathy

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3.2.b Workshop
Mixed Media Auto/ethnography: Using Qualitative and
Visual Methods to create a Love Story through videos,
photos, conversations and essays. By Sheila Katz.
University of Houston, Sociology Department.
To open the workshop, I will spend 15 minutes describing
the development of my current project: A Love Story:
Terminal Illness, Caregiving, and Egalitarian Marriage,
co-authored with Dr. Daniel Haworth. It is an
autoethnography of my late husband Dan's journey with
ALS and my journey as caregiver (ALS is motor neuron
disease—the disease Stephen Hawking and Lou Gehrig
had). The autoethnography is based on essays,
conversations, fieldnotes, journal entries, video interviews,
photos, and other sources from 2018-2021 to address
caregiving, career decision making, egalitarian marriage,
death/dying, and the pandemic. This project uses
Grounded Theory (Charmaz 2014), to explore, question,
engage, and dialogue about our experiences connecting to
broader social issues. Dan wrote several essays before he
died in April 2021. I will finish the academic book
according to our outline; and create a documentary and a
photo essay from the project.

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The body of the workshop is a discussion of how to use
qualitative and visual methods to create mixed methods
research projects. It will be appropriate for graduate
students and faculty as we explore data collection
techniques, analysis of qualitative and visual data, and
writing. Special emphasis on auto/ethnographies,
interviews, focus groups, online data, videos, photos, etc.
Last, a section on how to produce and publish scholarly
and creative products such as articles, short films, photo
essays, or books.
The workshop will contain significant time for participants
to brainstorm how their work could combine multiple
methods to create projects with a variety of products to
reach diverse audiences.
Keywords: qualitative mixed methods, autoethnography,
visual analysis, sociology of gender, death/dying,
caregiving

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Plenary Panel: Perspectives on Visual Sociology
from Kenya
Image as data: The role of visual sociology in research
methods creativity. By Gladys Nyachieo. Multimedia
University of Kenya.

Gladys Nyachieo (PhD) is a

Sociologist and senior lecturer at
the Faculty of Social Sciences at
Multimedia University of Kenya.
Currently, Head of
Department-Sociology. She has over
10 years’ experience in research.
Her research interests are mainly in
transport and include walking and
cycling, road safety, public
transport, boda boda motorcycles, gender issues in
transport and transport governance. She is currently a
Principal Investigator in two Projects: A comparative study
of Governance Process in Sustainable Urban Mobility
Planning in Kenya and Malawi (funded by VREF) and an
investigation into the health costs of motorcycle crashes in
Nairobi (funded by Transaid). Gladys recently published
three book chapters; Role of Women towards a Gender
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Responsive Transport Industry in Kenya” and Gendered
perspectives in mobility and safety in public transport in
Kenya and Water Management in The Palgrave Handbook
of Urban Development Planning in Africa and a Journal
article on Barriers and perceptions to walking and cycling
published by frontiers.

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 Exhibits & Posters
Normative Reconstruction. By Eric Sencindiver. University
of Richmond.
This project is a visual representation of the concept of
critical dualism. An idea articulated by Karl Popper based
on Plato’s Sociology. It covers the distinction between
natural laws and normative laws (manmade) In this case
images of national flags are a visual representation of
manmade laws, boarders, and institutions. When these
images are digitally rearranged with a filter utilizing
rotational symmetry unique patterns are produced. These
new patterns derived from the national flags are bound
only by the natural constraints of divine geometry. There
are virtually limitless patterns that can be created, and a
select number have been curated for the 2023 IVSA poster
session. Every international flag used in this project also
represents a county which allows dual citizenship. In
addition, the patterns pay homage to the traditional
African and Islamic world-renowned art forms. These fun
patterns acknowledge a variety of the nations of man and
at the same time in the spirit of critical dualism also
remind us of the divine natural laws that are visually
present in all accounts of life as we know it.

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Keywords: critical, dualism, symmetry

Content Co-Curation of Visual Cultural Heritage as a

Countermeasure to the McDonaldization of Higher
Education. By Brittney Nix-Crawford and Joanne Campbell.
Rosemont College.
Our topic of focus for the proposed poster presentation is
that of “Content Co-Curation of Visual Cultural Heritage as
a Countermeasure to the McDonaldization of Higher
Education.” We will explore “Seeing Beyond Dualisms”
through our interdisciplinary collaboration in the
Rosemont College Cultural Heritage Gallery over the past
two years.
The creation of the Rosemont College Cultural Heritage
Gallery in Kistler Memorial Library in collaboration with
multiple disciplines is a platform for content co-creation
that serves to unify students, faculty, and alumni in a
dedicated library space in line with Rosemont College’s
mission statement.

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This collaboration utilizes this college space as a living
laboratory for learning and as a launch pad for planning
experiential learning activities such as travel/study,
internships and alumni engagement events. In this
presentation we will utilize our collaborations on the
following exhibitions:
-Indigenous Art of North America Exhibit (with Indigenous
authors reading and land acknowledgement reading by
students) (October 2021 & October 2022)
-Arts of Africa Exhibit (in collaboration with Black Student
Union) - including student presentations and readings
(February 2021 & February 2022)
-Art and Mythology of Ireland Exhibit (in collaboration with
Thorn Literary Club) - including student presentations and
readings (March 2021 & March 2022)
-Healing Earth: Conversations of Sustainability, Healing and
the Decolonial Atlas (in collaboration with Rosegrow
Environmental Sustainability Club) - (April 2021 & April
2022)
Keywords: Cultural Heritage, Gallery, McDonaldization,
Content Co-Creation

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Visualising Menstruation in Nepal Poster; Sharing
creative visual multi media outputs to challenge
menstrual stigmas and taboos in Nepal. By Sara Parker.
Liverpool John Moores University.
Dignity Without Danger is a research project funded by the
British Academy GCRF Sustainable Development
Programme. It is a collaborative action research project
that has brought together staff from three Universities, 6
local NGO partners in Nepal and a number of creative
artists to explore the origins, diversity and impacts of local,
social, religious and cultural menstrual practices, which
deny people who menstruate the right to a ‘Dignified
Menstruation’.
Collaboration and producing creative educational visual
advocacy outputs has been at the heart of the project
since its inception. To this end the project has engaged
with a number of creative artists in Nepal, such as the art
collective Kaalo.101. Jay Poudyal from Stories of Nepal,
Sophie Maliphant from Kumari’s adventure with her moon
cycle and collaborated with Sara Baumann and worked
with women film makers in Far Western Nepal on a
collaborative film project. We have gathered 34 stories of
menstrual activists in Nepal to celebrate work being done

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from the grassroots to policy level to promote dignified
menstruation.
This poster brings together the creative outputs including
online books, virtual art exhibitions, blog posts,
augmented public murals and collaborative films to gain
feedback from a wider audience. Together they help
challenge the dominant narrative in Nepal and help to
generate dialogue into the complexities of menstrual
experiences in Nepal. Making research findings accessible
and facilitating a dialogue surrounding the concept of
dignified menstruation is vital for the silence and stigma
surrounding menstruation in Nepal, and further afield, to
be broken.
Keywords: collaborative action research, menstruation,
Nepal, multi-media

Recrafting a Colonial jewelry with traditional

goldsmithery techniques and ethnographic film. By Priya
Ange. EHESS.
The poster questions the role of the Anthropologist using
ethnographic film and working on a historical period and
material culture. How can the usage of audiovisual tools
and mobile phone can help to conduct historical
ethnography? How the film ethnography can unsettle the
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dualist fieldwork relation between the anthropologist, who
became the apprentice goldsmith and the "informants"
who are in the role of masters? How can video
ethnography give opportunities to produce materially new
objects crafted in the present time of the fieldwork yet
reproducing a colonial piece of jewelry still being worn and
meant by a diaspora community?
The poster will present a filmed case study of one colonial
piece of Jewelry from Pondicherry. The film ethnography
contributes to study the symbolic construction associated
with the city of Pondicherry. For the Franco-Pondicherrian
diaspora and the goldsmiths, these jewelries embody the
identity of “being a Pondicherrian.” For them, they are
culturally and socially crafted as emblems of the city,
inherited from its history and past familial memories. Thus,
we can see how their cultural, political and ethnic
identities are continually changing beyond the time-space
of cultural dualism. The film ethnography informs us on
the practices within the kinship network in the current
Franco-Indian diaspora, and on how national history were
integrated into family history. How the film ethnography
remains a way to conserve the trace of this colonial past?
The poster will incorporate visual elements (photos and
videos) as well as objects from the field.

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Keywords: -historical video ethnography, -jewelry,
-colonial time, -diaspora

Whitewashing: Skin and Clay. By Teri Frame. University of

Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Whitewashing: Skin and Clay explores the notion,
performance, and representation of whiteness. The
concept that there is a race of people who are white
emerged within the European imagination during the
Renaissance, developed throughout the colonial period,
and is still pervasive within contemporary thought. Upon
unearthing marble statues of classical antiquity,
Renaissance proto-archeologists were intrigued with what
they thought of as white statuary, despite evidence that it
was once covered in polychrome. Throughout the
following centuries, marble and porcelain replicas of such
works were left white. This centuries-long whitewashing of
representational art was synonymous with skin-whitening
trends popularized within the Elizabethan Era and
remaining prominent for centuries. As the concept of
purity and its association with whiteness emerged during
the Enlightenment, so did the race among European
nations for the recipe for porcelain. A completely white
clay body, free from iron, it quickly became a standard
material with which to convey the human form and
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represent “ideal” white skin. European and U.S.
aristocracy, military, and religious leaders, along with
representations of the Madonna and Child, were painted
white in life and art respectively, to convey their leisure
class status, their “superiority” to black and brown people,
and to justify imperialism, colonialism and slavery.
Keywords: Racialization, Representation, Whitewashing,
Art History
Exhibit: The Accidental Self. By Scott McMaster. Education
University of Hong Kong.
This series of accidental selfies flows across almost a
decade of time and half a dozen smart phones. The images
question how the contemporary smartphone’s camera app
mediates identity though a transgressive act, forcefully
compelling one to engage in the practice of epicurean
mementos.The captive reactions reveal a visceral
displeasure, my intention to capture the scene in front of
me is defied, instead I am suddenly, and without
provocation or preproduction intruded upon with “the
self” in a way I do not wish it to be seen. These selfies are
violations, not meant to be shared, consumed, or liked,
they transgress the socially codified practices of good
lighting, timing, counterfeit smiles, superfluous filters, and
attractive backdrops. Instead, they capture an unplanned

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and uninitiated image that has not been negotiated,
designed or authorized.
Initially deleted, seen as a violation, an annoying glitch of
the phone’s imaging apps who, seemingly autonomously,
switch to the front camera, almost in absence of the
slightest human intervention. Eventually relenting, the
phenomena was adopted, and the selfies captured
permitted to exist. The resulting series is united by the
unorthodox framing of the face and body, perpetually at
odds with both the reflection of self presented and the
increasingly autonomous nature of the machine and its
supposed desires.The presentation will showcase
'accidental selfies' captured over the last 7 years exploring
the evolution of selfie culture, touch screens, front facing
cameras and the hardware and software that have
fundamentally changed the way the general public
approaches image making, image dissemination and our
perception of self online.
Keywords: selfie photography, smart phones, machine
learning, AI, touch screen, HCI

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 Films on a Loop

Salmon Fishing in Chicago by Joshua Silver University of

Chicago.
The documentary Salmon Fishing in Chicago explores
Chicago’s shifting urban fishing ecologies, which include
South Side Chicago fishing communities, the nonhuman
biological life in and around Lake Michigan, state
researchers, ecologists, and wildlife managers. Unlike
traditional documentaries that center personal narratives
and interviewing, this film will instead follow processes,
knowledges, infrastructures, and non-human actors as
they shape and are shaped by human communities and
cultures.
Unbeknownst to many in the city, several species of
salmon enter Chicago's harbors every fall in a futile
attempt to lay their eggs. Though shrinking due to
ecological crises, the “salmon run” still attracts a small and
dedicated group of fishermen and women who catch the
large and majestic fish for both food and sport. The
catching of these fish, which can weigh more than forty
pounds and grow to be more than three feet long, are
commented on, modestly, in the outdoors columns of local
newspapers—a vestige of a once robust but now
threatened culture of urban fishing. While the
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documentary is neither just about salmon nor just about
fishermen, the beautiful banality of fishing in a major
metropolitan city will be central.
Our documentary brings together the artistic practice of
two filmmakers with the scientific practice of a sociological
ethnographer. Together, our team explores a range of
knowledges formed on and about Chicago’s urban fish
ecologies. Through the affordances of cinema, we will
stretch scalar and sociological imaginaries, tying together
the unexpected locations linked by labor and leisure on
Lake Michigan.

Reclaim the Ground by Julie Patarin-Jossec. Royal Society

of Arts.
«Reclaim the Ground» is an essay documentary film
grounded in the documentary poetics genre, including an
original experimental soundtrack. The film is structured
around ecofeminist statements (adapted from a Caroline
Merchant’s text) highlighting the cultural politics of daily
pollution via littering in natural environments. Through the
articulation of voice-over and a soundtrack made with
effect pedals and an electric guitar, the film tries to build a
multilayered narrative where the soundscape emphasizes
the visual language of the video, and where boundaries

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between documentary and poetics are questionned. The
film has been produced using videos and photographs shot
during the Summer 2020 in the St. Petersburg region, in
Russia, as a dialogue with local ecofeminist collectives.

Additional Films from Ethnografilm

A selection of films from Ethnografilm, a film festival held

every year in Paris that is co-sponsored by IVSA.

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