Reframing Visual Social Science Towards a More Visual Sociology and Anthropology

The burgeoning field of 'visual social science' is rooted in the idea that valid scientific insight into culture and society can be acquired by observing, analyzing and theorizing its visual manifestations: visible behavior of people and material products of culture. Reframing Visual Social Science provides a well-balanced, critical-constructive and systematic overview of existing and emerging modes of visual social and cultural research. The book includes integrated models and conceptual frameworks, analytical approaches to scrutinizing existing imagery and multimodal phenomena, a systematic presentation of more active ways and formats of visual scholarly production and communication, and a number of case studies which exemplify the broad fields of application. Finally, visual social research is situated within a wider perspective by addressing the issue of ethics; by presenting a generic approach to producing, selecting and using visual representations; and through discussing the specific challenges and opportunities of a 'more visual' social science.

Part I. Remodelling Visual Social Science: 1. Prologue and outline: (re)framing visual social science?; 2. An integrated framework for conducting and assessing visual social research; Part II. The Visual Researcher as Collector and Interpreter: 3. Researching 'found' or 'pre-existing' visual materials; 4. A visual and multimodal model for analyzing online environments; Part III. The Visual Researcher as Producer, Facilitator and Communicator: 5. The mimetic mode: from exploratory to systematic visual data production; 6. Visual elicitation techniques, respondent-generated image production and 'participatory' visual activism; 7. The 'visual essay' as a scholarly format: art meets (social) science?; 8. Social scientific filmmaking and multimedia production: key features and debates; Part IV. Applications/Case Studies: 9. Family photography as a social practice: from the analogue to the digital networked world; 10. A visual study of corporate culture: the workplace as metaphor; 11. Health communication in South Africa: a visual study of posters, billboards and grassroots media; Part V. Visual Research in a Wider Perspective: 12. Ethics of visual research in the offline and online world; 13. A meta-disciplinary framework for producing and assessing visual representations; 14. Advancing visual research: pending issues and future directions.

Luc Pauwels is Professor of Visual Research Methods in the Faculty of Social Sciences (Department of Communication Studies) and Director of the Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi) at the University of Antwerp.