Abstract
AbstractA significant effort in theorising and conceptualising the visual has been made within various disciplines. To mention only a few, Howard Becker (Art as collective action. Am Sociol Rev 767–776, 1974) in visual sociology, Lucien Taylor (Visualising theory. Routledge, 1994), Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy ((eds): Rethinking visual anthropology. Yale University Press, London, 1999) and Jay Ruby (Picturing culture: explorations of film and anthropology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000) in visual anthropology, Chris Jenk ((ed): Visual culture. Routledge, 1995) in cultural studies, Gillian Rose (Visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual methods. Sage, 2001) in geography and Sarah Pink (Doing visual ethnography. Sage, London, 2001) in visual ethnography, all produced fundamental works focusing on the visual in social sciences. This book, however, without diminishing the disciplinary work within the subject, proposes to approach visual methodologies in the specific context of a field of study, adopting an interdisciplinary approach that brings together geography, sociology, anthropology and communication studies. As Adrian Favell (Rebooting migration theory: interdisciplinarity, globality and postdisciplinarity in migration studies. In: Brettell C, Hollifield J (eds) Migration theory: talking across disciplines. Routledge, pp 259–278, 2007, p. 1988) has suggested: “On the face of it, there could hardly be a topic in the contemporary social sciences more naturally ripe for interdisciplinary thinking than migration studies.” In this piece we will attempt to explain why the adoption of visual methodologies in the field of migration studies is of particular interest.
Highlights
Amandine Desille and Karolina Nikielska-SekulaReality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images Susan SontagAs this quote from Susan Sontag (1979, p.153) indicates, images have always accompanied humans as means of interpreting and representing reality
We argue that the objectives of the process of image-production have implications, ethically obliging scholars to reflect on their position, on the context of image-production, and on the impact of their production amongst a wider range of representations
We will articulate the four claims that correspond to the four sections of this collective work, namely visuals enable to ground research in places, and focused on the embodied experiences of persons who have experienced migration; secondly, visuals tell stories and hold the potential of multiplying and complexifying accounts of migration; visual methodologies increase the possibilities for cooperation, and the need to recognise the competency of participants in knowledge production; and researchers are responsible for visual representations of migrations
Summary
Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images Susan Sontag. Images are capable of triggering emotional reactions and carry an emotional charge which is difficult to ignore. They are, transmitters of meanings, but can produce meanings too, independently and sometimes even against the language (Moxey, 2008). Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (2004; Edwards, 2012) went even further in discussing the ability of images to communicate. They focused on the materiality of photographs, arguing that they convey messages because of their visual content, and as material objects “through an embodied engagement with an affective object world, which is
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