Visual Essay Research Articles

Near and far: Tracing memory and reframing presence in pandemic-era Argentina.

Memory has been a central foundation of democracy and civil society in Argentina since the first years of the military dictatorship (1976-1983) when groups occupied public spaces to protest systematic disappearances and state repression that left 30,000 victims. It has taken decades to achieve some form of justice for state terror and repression, much of that shaped by the culture of memory and accountability that hinged on embodied forms of public protest. But what happens to cultural memory when a pandemic precludes traditional forms of gathering? And what does this reveal about how Argentines renegotiate the significance of shared remembering and presence? Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Buenos Aires, this visual essay examines the significance of shared embodied practices of remembering through the lens of pandemic restrictions that invite new insights into the relationship between presence and political belonging. Rather than simply reacting to specific instances of injustice, this essay argues for the significance of cultural memory practices as fundamentally constitutive of democratic culture and civil society in Argentina as it faces new challenges.

Curating #blackgirlquarantine.

This autoethnographic visual essay narrates a Black feminist praxis of ancestral collage-making within my curation of #blackgirlquarantine: an exhibition of blackwomxnhealing in the wake of 20201 (BGQ). I detail my spiritual, affective, and embodied journey of stretching collage art to make room for memorializing the lives of Black womxn and girls who are no longer here to tell their stories. I write at the intersection of healing, memory, and mourning, and merge a Methodology for the Black Feminist Sacred2 with visual anthropology and digital humanities to read creative rituals of digital altar work as text.

Double Time Pictures of the Arizona State Prison at Florence

This visual essay is drawn from Double Time, one of a series of three documentary projects on the theme of what might come after a prison is shuttered. Made partly in dialog with ongoing abolitionist organizing by Mass Liberation in South Phoenix, Double Time focuses on Arizona’s origins as a state, at the intersection of the Civil War and the echoes of the Haitian Revolution, as the War’s twin capacities of war-making and image-making pushed the US’ imperial expansion westward.

Society in sight: foundations, methods and current developments of visual social science

ABSTRACT This article presents a balanced account of visual social science in its successive emanations. It starts by defining the basic traits and assumptions of the visual study of culture and society and then moves to briefly sketch its origins in camera-based research and its gradual institutionalization. Then a discussion follows of the more recent period which is characterized by a broadening of the field of view in many respects: other non-camera based techniques have entered the scope, along with a more inclusive stance towards not directly visible referents. New technologies also have dramatically expanded the visual and spatial opportunities of visual research, and ways to include other senses than the visual are being considered. Next, the article moves to a concise discussion of different modes of visual data collection, production, and presentation. Four ‘vignettes’ complement this discussion by presenting applications of the main modes of visual social science: one about the study of found images, one involving researcher-produced images and another based on respondent-generated images, and lastly an excerpt of a visual essay. The final section examines some current challenges and opportunities of visual research in terms of navigating and partly overcoming several disciplinary and external expectations and constraints.

Designing the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) Assessment in the New York City Jails: A Visual Abolitionist Resistance to Data Infrastructures of Harm

The purpose of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) Intake Questionnaire is purportedly to evaluate the “risk of victimization” and “risk of abusiveness” for each incarcerated person in the New York City jails. Corrections officers completed it during the intake process through a blend of observations, records searches, and documentation of the incarcerated person’s responses. This visual essay engages with and disrupts the carceralities embedded within this triplicate form.

Just before Freedom

Abstract This Curated Spaces features a visual essay of photographs made by Alicia Sanguinetti, an Argentinean political prisoner of Alejandro Lanusse’s military government, on the last day of her captivity in Villa Devoto prison in Buenos Aires. Sanguinetti and her fellow political prisoners of the 1966–73 dictatorship were released by the democratic president Héctor Cámpora on the day he took office. This event, which occurred on May 25, 1973, is known as the Devotazo. Sanguinetti took these photographs—a roll of thirty-six black-and-white images—with a camera that her brother smuggled into the prison. The text includes comments by Alicia Sanguinetti from her interview with the author.

The costumers’ lens: An encounter with The Pink Silk Dress

This visual essay documents the evolution of a performative public encounter with an ‘everyday’ pink silk dress opening in June 2022. Narratives of Dress: The Pink Silk Dress (2022) was developed as part of the practice for a practice- based Ph.D. exploring how the contract for participation might be renegotiated between ‘everyday’ historical dress and the spectator in exhibitions and encounters with dress. Narratives of Dress: The Pink Silk Dress (2022) utilized the pink silk dress as a narrative artifact to evolve maker and making narratives informed by a professional practice of costuming for theatre. A prior emphasis on object- based study in the author’s studies and professional practice informed the interpretation and construction of historical dress for theatre and has evolved practices within her research to permit access to the often, ‘hard to reach’ narratives of everyday historical dress.

Literate matterings: young artists creating and talking about photography and meaning

In this visual essay, both photographs and talk are presented as four teenage artists from the northeastern United States study their engagement with texts in their everyday lives. What emerges is a representation of the young artists’ metaliteracies as they come to understand not only what their literacies are like but how they might matter.

Neither spectacular nor ordinary: a visual essay on imaginations and homes in Beijing from 2007 to 2019

This visual essay explores the intertwining relationships between urban transformation, homes (the physical dwellings), and imagination in Beijing over a time span of 12 years. The visual materials used in this study are photographs taken in and around the city of Beijing from the time leading up to the 2008 Olympic Games, in 2007, up to the pre-COVID-19 period. Inspired by Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) writing on the social practice of imagination, this article explores the ways in which the imagination – the image, the imagined, and the imaginary – reflects, as well as constructs, the discursive practices of ‘the good life’ in dwellings. The images of the ordinary home not only help investigate the practices of imagination in ordinary life, but more importantly, they serve as a tactical intervention that encourages as well as urges us to contemplate and reflect on the transformation of China. They compel us to ask questions. How do the politics of the spectacular Beijing intersect with the politics of non-spectacular, ordinary everyday life? How have imaginations of the good life that drive support for the state-orchestrated development been displayed, constructed, disseminated, and materialised in the social lives of the ordinary? I argue that imagination of the good life carries the potential to aspire and transform; yet, it can also impose control, and subjugate one to the network of power relations that produces order and normativity.

A comparison of non-verbal actions between Serbian and English native speakers in New Zealand: a visual essay

Abstract This visual essay examines the non-verbal actions and the production of identity of Serbian and English native speakers during a videoconferencing task in New Zealand. This cross-cultural study examines the modes of facial expression, posture, and hand/arm movements to show how these are telling of the identity of the Serbian and English native speakers. Although gesture and language have received significant attention in research, very few studies have addressed the cross-cultural non-verbal actions and no study has compared Serbian native speakers with New Zealand English speakers. This visual essay addresses this gap.

Reimagining Pigs – A Multispecies, Ecofeminist Research Method

ABSTRACT Food production is an example of inter- and intra-action between different species and abiotic actors. Yet, capitalism-driven food system is increasingly wreaking havoc on natural ecosystems and the species inhabiting them, including humans. Industrial farming is one such example. This article is inspired by ecofeminist thinking and views industrial pig farming through a multispecies lens using design and visual art methodologies. We believe that ecofeminism is prefigurative, shining brightly towards ‘a future of multispecies flourishing and the ultimate goal of planetary survival’ (Power 2020, viii). In such a future, human and more-than-human entanglements are not grounded in exploitation and extraction but instead are predicated on kinship and response-ability (Haraway 2016). Presented as a visual essay, the article draws on our interdisciplinary research project Re: Pig and the zine made as part of it. We consider how Re: Pig as an ecofeminist, interdisciplinary method may offer the opportunities for the emergence of more hopeful narratives. In these narratives, human and more-than-human might find alternative ways to thrive together in what seems to be a time of decline, undoing the relations of domination that subordinate more-than-human lives to human interests. This resonates with the idea of creating care-centred and justice-oriented feminist futures.

Walking alongside elders: A visual essay

This visual essay has links with Miller’s El Duende one-canvas process painting by utilizing a different methodology and form with the use of four short films Into the Earth, Medicine Walk, Fireside Creatures and Whispers. The author screened these films in a range of settings to broaden conversation and dialogue about the Wild Elders therapy group’s working process. From these discussions she created this visual essay as a series of photographs and written text. It leads the viewer through key visual elements mapping the journey of individual and group transformation and growth. The essay concludes that by sharing the source material via animated filmmaking, the author has found new ways of extending the therapeutic reach of environmental arts therapy where visual landscapes of interconnection with Nature inspire creative acts of participation as well as personal and collective change. It offers the reader a process whereby they too can walk alongside elders.

An interdisciplinary action for caring for the biodiversity of the Canary Islands through arts-based explorations

This visual essay is a reflective interdisciplinary encounter between three undergraduate students in a Bachelor of Elementary Education participating in a final year degree project narrated by two educators, one from art education and the other from science education. It applies a situated art intervention to sensory land walking methodologies to raise awareness about the loss of biodiversity in the Canary Islands. Walking as a pedagogical inquiry method supports the humanities in the post-human era for a new relationship between science and art. Art connects to science through the facilitation of sensate and kinaesthetic experiences that interweave the knowledge and methodologies of the educators, connecting lived experiences and memories of all participants in reshaping our teaching and learning culture. Our interdisciplinary approach broadens the perspectives of future educators towards an artistic practice engaged with nature, building civic commitment that pursues a holistic vision of a sustainable education that begins with the care of our immediate environment.

The (In)conspicuous Body: Perceiving and Visually Representing Physical Sensations: A Visual Essay

This artistic investigation is based on personally experienced symptoms caused by nervous disorders and is to be seen as a graphic phenomenology. Drawing physical sensations raises fundamental questions as to the very possibility of visual representation and of conveying to others what cannot be seen. Efforts to come to grips with bodily perception that has been altered as a result of a chronic illness lead, by dint of introspection and externalization, to a new understanding of one’s own body. In addition, the graphic catalogue of physical sensations can provide a stimulus for a response on the part of other persons affected by the disease while, at the same time, contributing in a general way to conveying what is simply difficult to formulate in words.

IMPRINT

This visual essay explores a fragment of the journey to know our ancestors in their absence. The pregnant silences of archives, skewed by years of historical erasure and the remnants of colonial legacy, so often obscure our walk toward collective belonging and a deeper understanding of self as Caribbean people. Washerwoman (2018), the sculpture featured in the essay, is the product of an attempt to know our progenitors through the labor of our hands, silently working alongside theirs, across temporalities. We mourn the blurred edges of their photographs and pay homage to the mundane moments of their existence, so densely knitted together to create our own reality.

Understanding emerging from interspecies relations: Horses, pigs, insect hotels, peat bogs in artistic practices, inquiries and processes of becoming to understand in research-writing

This thematic issue of Research in Arts and Education focuses on exploring research with species other than humans. In the original call, my co-editor Helena Sederholm and I named animals, plants, lichen, moss, and fungi as possible others, or rather partners with whom the carried out artistic and arts-based research could be carried out. The first volume of this special issue was published in 2022. Almost a year later, we publish this second volume that has a particular emphasis on the contradictory, paradoxical relations humans have with other species, the natural processes that are part of human life as well as with the conflicting and exploitative relations humans have built with particular species or places. The authors focus on personally built relationships and encounters with individual living or dead animals, while other authors bring attention to and investigate culturally built notions and contradictory practices that have become normative, dominant practices or perceptions. These articles and visual essays are characterized by posthumanist and postmaterialist orientations and although their strategies and approaches for research and art practices vary, their orientation can be characterized to be driven by exploratory criticality as well as deep reflection guided by sensitivity to arts and other epistemic traditions. As such, they are deeply involved in modes of increasing understanding with and through art.

Amantes (Lovers): Investigating autonomy, autopoiesis, and polyrhythm with horses

This visual essay with moving image explores a practice between the artist and three horses who are brought together by their shared response to the Afro-Cuban son clave: A rhythmic pattern that is ostensibly neither from the artist’s nor the horses’ cultural backgrounds. The essay investigates autonomy, autopoiesis, and polyrhythm with horses; and it considers the role of the change and stability paradox in potentially leading to more rhythmic attraction the less this is imposed or managed by the artist. The artist speculatively compares her practice with horses to the creative learning pedagogy developing in Wales in contrast to England’s prescriptive teaching.

Grounding the Predicament and the Possibility to Re-Orient, Unknown Pig

This visual essay explores confronting the question of banal everyday exploitation of non-human animals through critical question-posing and, especially, by juxtaposing a video and text in an awkwardly confrontational pairing. Speciesism is a way to bypass emotions on a societal level. The article aims to open new possibilities for reconsidering this separation between humans and nonhuman animals. It is proposed that the virtualization of pictures of animals is a form of exploitation that creates a distance between us and the cruelty. The question is, have we become all too human altogether, and what is the essence of this human exceptionalism from non-human animals? The essay concludes by proposing a more relational ontology that is needed to get closer to the ethical relations with non-human animals.

A Solution to Existential Climate Crisis: RTFM

This visual essay in "The Photographer's Frame" says that he first step to resolving humanity’s greatest existential threat, the current climate breakdown, may be as simple as “read Earth’s operating manual.”

Body-Mind-Soul

A visual essay by Joanne Morra on the work of multidisciplinary artyist Heather Agyepong