Program

IVSA 2014, Program Visual Dialogues in Post-Industrial Societies: Transforming the Gaze 26-27-28th June, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA

Thursday, June 26th

9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m. Session Registration (Bayer Hall Foyer)

10:00 a.m. Conference Opening: Documentary Film (Bayer Hall Auditorium)

Cadences (38 min) Alexandra Tillman, France [email protected]

Cadences is a 38 minute documentary made in the frame, intention and context of sociological research. It is an example of an emerging field of sociological research in France referred to as Filmic-Sociology, that embraces the production of film in relation to sociological studies. Cadences is situated in Le Havre, a French de-industrialized town, and it tells the story of the son of a steel worker who has decided not to follow his father's path but rather to embrace the clandestine techno movement called free parties.

Alexandra Tilman made this film for her PhD in Filmic-Sociology at Evry University in France under the direction of Professor Joyce Sebag, which she will defend in June, 2014. She has studied sociology and cinema since high school, and considers herself on a dual trajectory of film and sociology that has carried her through her Master's and now to her Ph.D. She has taught cinema and sociology at Evry University for the past six years. She has made two earlier films on the free parties movement and the decline of industrial work, and she will continue to produce sociological films that question the relation between work and leisure in modern societies related to the concept of "freed time" (temps libéré).

10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m. Concurrent Sessions

1.2.1 Framing Society (Bayer Hall 102)

Photoicon: Between Art, Culture and Politics Kamila Zarembska, Jagiellonian University & Pedagogical University in Cracow, Poland [email protected]

Every day we browse through hundreds of photographs in newspapers or websites. Some of them go down in history and become icons of history – while others do not. An image can constitute a powerful source of information about society – its values, ideals and social memory. Photoicons are photographs that hold particular and important significance in society. Symbols carried by photoicons are appealing, easy to decode, and therefore habitually interpreted – it is a visualization of common knowledge. On the one hand they convey meanings and myths as a result of the dominant ideology in society, provide values that are being transferred in culture and represent patriotism, honor, pride, success, resistance – they generate a significantly larger number of meanings than regular photographs. On the other hand, the signification carried by them is so strong that they have the power to break away from the original meaning, forming a gap, which creates a field for semiotic guerrilla warfare. This makes contesting the dominant ideology possible through a remake of the popular symbols and myths carried by photoicons. This work aims to analyze a subjectively selected set of photoicons in order to deconstruct and identify their hidden significations and indicate the function of the photoicon in society.

‘The Most Dangerous Place’: Race, gender, and the technology of invisibility in media texts Laura Porterfield, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater [email protected]

This paper explores the ways recent (2009-2013) virtual and physical pro-life media render invisible the sociopolitical, institutional, and cultural problems facing black young women as they make decisions about whether to keep or terminate unwanted pregnancies. These media texts present “confrontational truths” based off of data from the Center for Disease Control’s Abortion Surveillance 2007 report. These truths intentionally mask, distort, or otherwise ignore the very real problems facing young black women (rape, incest, sexual attack/abuse, poverty, health disparities, etc.). In these texts, the black female body is used as a political tactic exploited to serve larger political and religious agendas and in consequence contributes to the pejorative mediated discourse around how black females are represented. It is important, then, to understand what is masked – what larger issues are made invisible in these texts and in the larger discourses surrounding them– and how. To do this, I will examine visual texts collected from newspapers and original photography between 2009 until the present using content and discourse analysis, systematically analyzing what is present and not present in the frame in conjunction with other visual and written texts related to pro-life/abortion/anti-abortion campaigns. This analysis has the potential to contribute to an increased understanding of the micro-methodology of the technology of invisibility, particularly as it relates to racial and gendered representations of young black women in mass media texts.

The Photographic Portrait and the Depiction of Authority in the Context of Politological Analysis: The case of the former Greek Prime Minister G.A. Papandreou (2009-2011) Nikos Kaplantzis, Greek Political Science Association, Greece [email protected]

Murray Edelman has supported that political action has always had a form of expressional symbolism; without it, the Republic would not be able to maintain its cohesion. In the mass media democracy, the problems occur when theatrical politic colonize the Political; when the latter is abandoned to mass media system logic. This article discusses the biomorphical modernization that is absolutely harmonized with the “culture of proximity”, the “instrumental rationalization”, the “consumerist individualism” and the “democracy of emotion”, in the case of former Greek Prime Minister G.A. Papandreou. This modernization may even lead politicians to stage incidents so that the mass media can report them. In a nutshell, we analyze a purifying fabrication of an appealing image, in the context of political aestheticization that reinforces illusions, thus perpetuating asymmetrical power relations. The photographic portraits of G. A. Papandreou resist to the “portrait legitimacy” of the past; i.e. gradually iconographically converted into un-disciplinary and, more or less, post-modern “emotional” depictions of the “psychological privacy” of the individual. They provoke a rupture with many of the staging techniques that defined, for many years, the official and unofficial portraiture of politicians. As meta-images, these portraits reclaim the psychological notion of “scopophilie” by objectifying the view of the spectator; the spectator becomes subject of the view, which objectifies what used to be the viewed as agent of the action. As “accomplice staged portraits”, they constitute a new order of expression, which is based upon the technique of invisible photography that marks the passing from the public to the private.

A Frame Analysis for the Health Discourse in Mexican Television Tonatiuh Cabrera Franco, Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales – UNAM, Mexico [email protected]

In this study we focuses on the analysis of the health discourse in mexican open television, considering that this medium is the one that offer most selective diffusion and participation ( Thompson , 1993), because their coverage in this country is 92.6 %. We used for this research , two methodological tools , first a media monitoring on the four channels with national coverage in each of its programs counters; and then, taking the product with the most presence advertised we applied a frame analysis on the textual and visual dimension. Among the findings, we found that 55 % of broadcast spots correspond to the regulatory framework of the general mexican health law , with most of these occupied by health products with 21% and food and drinks 22 % . Of all the categories was Activia, a Dannone yogurt the one which had a higher number of occurrences, for which we applied a frame analysis. The results show that that the yogurt occupies a very close language use to drugs using medical signs and symptoms to deliver a product that promises to regulate bowel function (related to the third cause of medical consultation in Mexico gastrointestinal disorders ), with this we could see the medicalization of television speech in Mexico that has transcended medicines or cosmetics and has come to food.

1.2.2 Imagery in Ethnography (Bayer Hall 103)

It’s Supposed to be Offensive: Images of revolt in Muslim ‘Taqwacore’ punk rock Amy McDowell, University of Pittsburgh [email protected]

This paper shows how American Muslim ‘Taqwacore’ (taqwa means god consciousness in Arabic) punk rock youth combine Islamic, Islamophobic, and punk rock imagery to start conversations about religious conservatism and racism in U.S. popular culture. For the presentation, I draw on Taqwacore album covers, show flyers, photographs, T-shirt designs, ethnographic observations, qualitative interviews, and videos to illuminate how Taqwacores use offensive imagery to make people think about the struggles American Muslim youth face in a white, Protestant Christian dominated society. I argue that Taqwacores do not simply provoke their audiences for the sake of shock. Taqwacore images do important political work: they fuse seemingly disparate cultural worlds together.

Blocos Afros as Social Change Deinya Phenix, St Francis College [email protected]

Proposed is a presentation of observations and analysis of the social structure of “Carnaval” in Salvador, Bahia. Data were obtained in the course of participant observation of preparations and performance by Cortejo Afro, Projecto Dida, and other culturally based social organizations known as Blocos Afros. In this case, participant observation entailed two seasons of attending meetings, rehearsals, and street demonstrations ("ensaio") and performances with percussionists in the role of peer. It also entailed visits to schools, headquarters, and religious houses ("terreiro") to investigate how Blocos Afro use carnival and music to improve impoverished communities and vulnerable populations. The paper includes analysis of data on mission, membership, participation, training, performance and reputation of these urban social organizations. Comparative analysis suggests a strong similarity with organizations such as Sectionals and Comparsas in Trinidad and Cuba. A common feature of these organizations is public presence, especially street performance as representation of African based heritage as well as regional and group culture. Documentation of variation among Blocos Afro and their reputations also suggests a correlated theme of public service, even within organizations with no explicit service orientation in their mission. Global and local stratification is also evident, as is the tension between art and capital, in the use of public space by these groups.

Outside the Circle: Visualizing life history Christopher Leo Schmidt, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs [email protected]

In visual research and its presentation, video is still battling to represent a respectable medium with which to do social research. Often, the written word is is regarded as more objective and reliable than video, though video can add the missing visual data to compliment the aural. Writing about visual data is still seen to be the final product of the researcher, and the visual product is seen as an accompaniment. In researching life histories the use of visual data, when treated with the same care and ethics as the written word, can produce insights into the minds of participants that allow the audience, both academic and public, a deeper understanding of personal experience. In the same ways that we frame, edit, and voice the written life history we can add elements of performance and story telling to the visual life history, giving us a richer form of data to represent our narrators. Incorporating elements of cinematic sociology gives the researcher an academically representative work that is also able to be enjoyed by the general public. Through visual mediums and creativity, life histories can enter into the field of visual sociology, where audience perception of produced works invoke a critical reflection into personal experiences of society rather than only institutional history. experiences of society rather than only institutional history.

Can the Gaze be Transformed? A critical examination of visual ethnography of foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong Carol Chao Pui Ha, The Chinese University of Hong Kong [email protected]

The paper employs visual ethnography method to study the life of foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong. Representing the various activities of the subjects including their beauty contest, their gathering in public spaces, the church activities via images, this research endeavors to examine the politics of visibility and invisibility underpinning this specific group of migrant workers. While asserting that visual ethnography is especially powerful in capturing the emotions, spatial patterns and visuality, the paper, however, further investigates the power between the researcher and the subjects underlying the visual method. To what extent are the subjects empowered? Are they being turned into objects of gaze in the process of visual ethnography? What is the line that distinguishes empowerment and exploitation? These questions inevitably lead to the ethical and epistemological assumptions of visual research method

1.2.3 Popular Culture I (Canevin Hall 311)

Visual Portrayal of Turkish Food Heritage in Diaspora Movies Ilkay Kanik, Beykent University, Turkey [email protected]

Migration has caused global social change by many ways in history. Societies and civilizations have taken shape by migration of cultures, encountering, influencing and being affected by each other. Immigrant culture at diaspora has collective memory with home country. Diasporas are also characterized by the role played by a collective memory which is intermingled by various cultural backgrounds. They have been perpetuating their identity by living styles in which eating, and cooking habits and different languages play dominant roles. My main purpose of study is how diaspora connect itself with the past in this perplexing structure. People who live in diaspora makes connection with homeland by movies. Cultural heritage and identity transform from motherland to diaspora by visual food narratives. Food is a strong sign to display culture. Conveying identity by food has unique visual language. Hamid Naficy describes diaspora movies with their accent. I will look at two Turkish director’s film who are living in diaspora. One of them is Fatih Akın who lives in Germany, other is Ferzan Ozpetek in Italy. What and how they carry their Turkish food culture heritage to their movies by visually is my main topic. I will use discourse analyses to display their visual language and inquire the relationship with diaspora cultures.

Learning to Live with Freaks, or Tyrion Lannister Should Get a Job in a Sideshow Andrew Owen, Cabrini College [email protected]

Tod Browning’s, Freaks (1932), has both the dubious and prestigious distinction of holding the record for the longest ban of any film in the history of British movie censorship, from 1932 to 1968. It can also be considered the work that began the demise of Browning’s creatively autonomous career, ironically a pinnacle whose attainment, following the release of, Dracula, in 1930, allowed the director to develop and film a screenplay based Tod Robins’ short story, Spurs (1923). Over eighty years following the film’s initial release, what does the work reveal concerning societal desire to construct and enjoy, for want of a better expression, the freakish, all that is contradictory to the perceptibly “normal”, epitomized within the confines of Browning’s work (and especially related to the ideology of the human body) by the majority of its central characters? Similarly, or perhaps again freakishly, what does the work reveal about society’s need to harness all that is considered deviant or abnormal, to enforce the norm through the fear of moral corruption and repercussion, encapsulated within filmmaking through censorship and banning?

Mongol On: Mythic structures and mixed realities in biker imagery Norman Conti, Duquesne University [email protected]

This paper explicates how outlaw motorcycle clubs are depicted as well as how they represent themselves in popular culture and social media. Specifically, we examine iconic images of bikers and motorcycle gangs going back to their earliest cinematic representations up through recent television programs like Sons of Anarchy and True Detective. This fictionalization is juxtaposed with the self-generated images that the bikers and their clubs post on their official websites. Finally, both of these narratives are considered in relation to the ironies of how these clubs function in reality.

1:30p.m.- 3:00p.m. Concurrent Sessions

1.3.1 Hybridity and Decategorization: How Can Visual Sociology Build Understanding? (Bayer Hall 102) Panel Chair: Diane Grams, Yale University

Hybridity in Street Performance of Zulu and Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans Diane Grams, Yale University [email protected]

Hybridity has many meanings and has wide application in the history of research on racial and ethnic peoples, cultures, and languages. In short it means “a mixing” – of two species, languages, cultures. Black scholars, and postmodernists in general, have used the term in discussion of oppositional discourses. As Bakhtin notes, this mixing happens “within a single encounter… between two different consciousnesses, separated from each other by … social differentiation or some other factor.” Hybridity can be a politically charged “double-voicing” often seen in satire, irony and carnival as a form of resistance, or it can be organic where there is fusion giving birth to new forms and therefore creating the possibility for a new world view. This analysis of digital images gathered between 2007 and 2013 in New Orleans of street performance of Zulu and Mardi Gras Indians, sheds light on the meanings of double voicing as resistance or intercultural mixture. Often seen as a hallmark of post-modern, post-colonial, global discourses, these performances are interpreted as creative intermixing and culmination of multiple cultural histories and trajectories, while rejecting static, essentialist categorization.

Researching Aesthetic Dialogues: The affective metamorphic potential of sameness Melissa Joy Wolfe, Monash University, Australia [email protected]

This paper discusses my film Girls’ Tales, 2014. This performative documentary comprises interviews regarding recollections of experiences and opportunities of two intergenerational groups of Australian schoolgirls. This filmic work contests the notion of representation as merely a mirror of actuality and draws on the work of Bill Nichols, Judith Butler and Karen Barad, amongst others, in suggesting that the political power of the filmic image is the creation of a reality as phenomenon, as an action of intra-action between participants, image and phantom audience. This intra-action is both affective and aesthetic, a creative process, an event, a continual happening during the making and multiple re-presentation, that although bounded, these boundaries are never fixed and therefore the intra-action is unpredictable. This filmic research as phenomena can build new understandings as it productively does things. Visual sociological research matters as it has the potential to explicitly promote notions of differentiation as not about othering. In this research othering does not require exteriority but rather the making of connections where participants, film and audience are entangled emergent parts of phenomena and are fluid and co-constituted. The visual filmic image allows aesthetic affective connection, making traces discernible, recognizing the other as self.

The Mapuche Representation: Visual dialogues for identity recognition María Victoria Barriga Jungjohann, Universidad Católica de Temuco, Chile [email protected]

The paper focuses on a group of posters made by Mapuche movements and placed on Temuco streets, Chile, in the last four years. They represent how Mapuche people relate to Chilean society to express their demands for justice and recognition and also they constitute a political instrument, as well as a mean of self-representation. The paper analyzes, in a semiotic perspective, the way they manipulate western visual constructions and techniques to communicate a specific message in different cultural and political contexts that show different visions of Mapuche future. This visual material calls for a critical visual approach to bring some light to an essentialist perspective that blurs cultural hybridity which clearly appears in this mean of communication.

(In)voluntary Change: Reconciling sojourn-related identity shifts with origin culture continuity Ben McNair, Illinois State University [email protected]

In our modern, globalizing world, sojourns -- extended periods of time during which people live, work, or study abroad with the intention of returning to their countries of origin -- are becoming an increasingly common element of the human experience. Living abroad is often necessarily accompanied by some degree of identity change, and these changes affect how well one integrates into the host culture and how "livable" one's life abroad really is. While a large and growing body of literature exists that outlines mechanisms, degrees, and types of identity change experienced while abroad, a lesser-understood aspect of the sojourn experience is one's reentry into the culture of origin after the sojourn has come to an end. Once sojourners return, changed in both nuanced and significant ways by their time abroad, how durable are those sojourn-related identity changes? How do returned sojourners reconcile immediate and long- term incongruence between personal identity change and origin culture continuity? To answer these questions I use visual methods, including photo and object elicitation and photography, alongside in-depth interviewing, to explore reentry processes and experiences. These methods assist in an investigation of the links between material culture, symbolic meaning, and representations of self. This study also contributes to an understanding of both active and passive mechanisms of reconciliation and adaptation in the form of habits, deliberate acts, personality shifts, relationships, and the incorporation of artifacts and/or “talismans” from the sojourn into everyday intimate environments.

1.3.2 Ethical Challenges at the Frontiers of Visual Social Research (Bayer Hall 103) Panel Chair: Deborah Warr, University of Melbourne

Working with Images in Contested Contexts Jonathan S. Marion, University of Arkansas [email protected]

Since 2002 photography has been at the heart of my research into the culture and community of competitive ballroom dance. More recently, and as ballroom-based TV-shows have become part of popular culture, dancers’ images have become part of their popular capital and not only their dance-specific status. As part of this media presence many dancers have begun “popular” modeling (i.e. not dance specific), which has lead me to related research on issues of body and identity amidst dancers/models. During the same time period the shift to digital photography, and the immense expansion of online access and resources has redefined the mediascapes within which photography is pursued and practiced. This has given rise to a new re-iterative dynamic for images, as these are created, disseminated, and re-appropriated for myriad (including conflicting) reasons, each with its own significance and repercussions. In this paper I use concrete examples of research-related images to explore the often contested and “messy” terrain of seven visual ethics considerations: (1) representational authority; (2) decontextualization/circulation of images; (3) presumed versus actual outcomes of image display; (4) relations/responsibilities towards participants; (5) balancing privacy and publicity based on participants’ wishes; (6) the importance of ongoing and informed consent; and (7) implications amidst globalized media. Far from hypothetical or abstract topics, I present real-life use and conflicts between image producers, publishers, and participants to highlight past negotiations (successful and problematic) as well as remaining challenges and obstacles— including my own ongoing questions and struggles.

Identifying Ethical Challenges in Visual Research: An in vivo approach Susan Cox, University of British Columbia, Canada & Deborah Warr, University of Melbourne, Australia. The Visual Research Collaboratory. [email protected] [email protected]

For this presentation we draw on the metaphor of an in vivo approach social research to discuss the development of ethical guidelines for visual methods. Where in vitro (in glass) studies isolate ‘organisms’ from their usual environment (usually in a test tube), in vivo (within the living) studies involve the whole living organism. Visual methods are increasingly being used across a broad range of disciplines and digital technologies are expanding the ways in which images can be created and shared as well as providing new applications for these methods. We felt that visual methods present both familiar and novel kinds of ethical issues that are linked to the kinds of data that are generated, the processes through which data are created and the sensitive topics that the methods are frequently used to explore. We initiated a project that drew on researchers’ own experiences of conducting research using visual methods to develop a set of guidelines. We were keen to identify some of the most pressing, unresolved and/or complex ethical challenges that were being presented to researchers. This material would inform guidelines to assist researchers and ethics committees to recognise and prepare for ethical issues presented through visual methods. In the presentation we explain the process for gathering material for the guidelines. This involved asking researchers and artists, working across a range of disciplinary perspectives, to draw on their experiences of conducting research involving visual methods to write a short discussion paper in response to four questions. Researchers were encouraged to take a reflective and self-reflexive stance to these experiences. We also facilitated a series of workshops involving participants in Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Beneficence and Contemporary Art: When aesthetic judgment meets ethical judgment Barbara Bolt, University of Melbourne, Australia [email protected]

The National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2007) establishes a working set of guidelines for the ethical conduct for research within Australian Universities. One of the primary principles relates to questions of “public good.” The question of public good comes under the principle of beneficence. Beneficence involves an ethical judgment about whether “the likely benefits of the research must justify any risks of harm or discomfort to the participants, to the wider community, or to both.” The question of minimizing risk and discomfort becomes a key point of tension when artists become engaged in artistic research and their “research” become subject to the guidelines of The National Statement. Driven by the esthetics of the sublime, the avant-garde impetus demands that art produces discomfort and brings its audience into crisis. For artists this discomfort and crisis is precisely art’s benefit, whilst for an ethics committee such discomfort may be deemed an unacceptable risk. Here-in lies a conflict between the notions of beneficence as defined by the code and those recognized by the artistic community. It raises the question: What is the value of art to a society if it becomes so comfortable that it no longer provokes artistic shock? Through an examination of the work of socially engaged artist Amy Spiers and the performance work of Moran Sanderovich, this paper examines how two artists reconfigure the notion of beneficence as a principle that incorporates provocation and discomfort.

Trust, Representation, and the Attention to Process in Visual Sociology Jeff Sheng, Stanford University [email protected]

How does the practice of visual sociology build trust with our subjects and in that process create deeper representations? As visual sociologists, we are often concerned with the meaning of our images after they have been displayed, and how others receive, interpret and derive understanding from our work. Yet sometimes lost in our discipline, is an attention to the relationships we build and the phenomenological process based on acts of trust, representation and subject-author collaboration. This paper draws on my experience as a photographer and visual ethnographer, where for 5 years between 2009-2014, I photographed and interviewed over one hundred United States military service members who self-identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT). These individuals were subject to discrimination based on laws prohibiting LGBT service members from being open about their sexual orientation or gender identity in the U.S. military. Through this experience, three valuable lessons emerged that I argue are strengths in the process of visual sociology: (1) Trust was formed through the unique dynamics of power and risk that were negotiated between photographer and the photographed; (2) Representation through visibility became a powerful voice and incentive for a marginalized and invisible group; and (3) Collaboration in the creation of their portraits resulted in deeper meaning than otherwise. I contend that as visual sociologists, we must be attuned to the power of such processes, and I conclude with suggestions to help us understand these valuable tools.

1.3.3 Popular Culture II (Canevin Hall 311)

Popular Culture and Workplace Gendering among Varieties of Capitalism: Working women and their representation in Japanese Manga Peter Matanle, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom [email protected]

Female empowerment is a prerequisite for a just and sustainable global society in the 21st century. Being the most developed non-Western country, Japan offers an instructive window onto concerns about gender relations and its depiction by media under globalization and the transformation to post-industrial society, especially in developing East and Southeast Asia. Although overall gender equality is advancing in Japan, difficulties remain, especially in achieving equality in the workplace. In this paper I first describe how manga is the core media in Japan’s hypermediated cultural space, heavily influencing the development of derivatives such as animation, video games, advertising, and merchandising, as well as television, film, and literature. I then draw on theories of ontological commitment and the psychology of fiction to critically analyse the role of popular visual culture—manga—in the reproduction of gender inequality in the Japanese workplace. I present examples of four of the most popular mainstream manga aimed at working men and women in Japan and show how women are visually and textually depicted. I argue that the hyper-mediated fictional realism of representative tropes generates an ontological commitment to characters and narratives among consumers that reinforces the reproduction of a culturally exceptionalist national political economic space, one of whose essential defining characteristics is a gendered workplace. The research suggests important implications for researching the relationship between culture, in all its forms, and spatial variation in persistent institutional biases among varieties of capitalism.

“Chicago: City in a Garden” Film Screening Jeremy Newman, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey [email protected]

Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden) examines Chicago from cultural, historical, and sociological perspectives. This documentary video's unflinching realism counters the sanitized city of the popular imagination. Its montage sequences, comprised of archival film clips and digital footage, immerse viewers in a timeless sense of place.

Buy Your Self: Allusions and illusions of self in Israeli television advertisements Michelle Shir-Wise, Bar-Ilan University, Israel [email protected]

The current research treats television advertisements during prime time as a cultural script that is interpreted and used by the viewer to construct and maintain identities. Specifically, the study explores the representations of self that emerge in 876 Israeli television advertisements broadcast during prime time, as it examines the "gaze" that is offered to viewers as a means for managing the self in day-to-day life. The four main categories used in the analysis were age, gender, status and discourses. The paradoxical images, that emerged in all categories, display, what I term conforming individualism . I use the term to describe the cultural contradictions of ads, which extol individualism on the one hand, while also promoting conformity either through images of collectivity or by presenting ideal models. Few authors have undertaken an empirical examination that would allow for the understanding of the process through which the mode of individualism embedded in consumer capitalism, translates emancipatory messages into disciplinary ones. By doing so, the current research hopes to contribute to a more critical viewing of ads and other cultural expressions of the mass media.

Shifting Gears: The generational divides of motorcycle clubs Joshua Eichenbaum, John Jay College of Criminal Justice [email protected],

The American motorcycle gang of the 20th century has been celebrated in Hollywood movies, popular fiction, autobiography and by researchers. Representations of gang life, replete with Harley Davidson Motorcycles, have produced iconic images that often appear unchanged over time, except for the model of bike. This film examines a motorcycle gang in New York City and its members that have matured and changed, though far less than the “Gold Wing” seniors that are their peers; it seeks to place these gangs in the context of neighborhood life and in relation to the emergence of a new generation of bikers that are forging their own traditions that sometimes compliment or contradict older forms.

3:15p.m.-4:00 p.m.

Welcoming Address (Bayer Hall Auditorium)

Visual Dialogues in Post-Industrial Societies: Transforming the gaze Douglas Harper, IVSA President [email protected]

4:00p.m.-5:00 p.m.

Documentary Film (Bayer Hall Auditorium) Abandominium (33 minutes) Greg Scott [email protected]

"Abandominium" is an observational ethnografilm that chronicles the lives of five heroin injectors who live together in an abandoned apartment building on the west side of Chicago. The film follows Steve and Pam, the heroin-dependent married couple who run the house, and their heroin-using housemates--Ida, John, and Spider--as they forge the best possible existence in the face of tall odds against them. This film explores and dissects an essential property of street-based heroin user culture: antagonistic communalism.

Greg Scott is the director of the Social Science Research Center and an associate professor of sociology at DePaul University. Greg is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Video Ethnography, the first-ever journal for the peer review of ethnographic films and videos. At DePaul, Greg teaches courses on ethnographic documentary film production and photographic/visual sociology. Since 1989 Greg has produced and/or directed more than 50 documentary films, many of which have been broadcast on television (e.g., National Geographic Network, BET Network, MSNBC) but most of which have been independently distributed through Sawbuck Productions, Inc.

5:00-7:00 Wine reception, Bayer Hall Foyer

Friday, June 27th

9:00a.m.-10:30a.m. Concurrent Sessions

2.1.1 In/visibilities (Bayer Hall 102) Panel Chair: Marisol Clark-Ibáñez, Professor, California State University San Marco

A Theory of Invisibility Ravindra Mohabeer, Vancouver Island University, Canada [email protected]

This paper explores invisibility as a theoretical construct. How can some things be seen but also remain invisible, purposefully or by accident? How does invisibility allow other things that can rarely be seen to be profoundly influential? The word invisible appears in a wide range of literature, spanning multiple disciplines, time periods, geographies and constituencies. When it is used, it typically acts as a placeholder for future intervention in, or deferred explication of a phenomenon. It is important to remember that being ‘invisible’ is an outcome of the process of invisibility. Despite its wide application in research and practice, without deeper deliberation of how invisibility works, the concept will remain imprecise and less helpful than it ought to be. This paper aims to consider why invisibility has received little direct attention as an analytical lens and to define it as a distinct construct.

Ghosts: Women, HIV and invisibility Kathleen Grove, Palomar College [email protected]

“We are still the ghosts in everybody’s eyes. . . Its still a secret. We are like that nasty little secret you put in the closet and don¹t say anything about. Women. . . we are out there. There are a lot of women out there who are positive, but we are never seen. This is an epidemic and it isn’t even recognized on a regular basis. How do they expect to finally cure it?” Thirty years into the HIV epidemic women remain undercounted, underserved and isolated. Although approximately 27% of adolescents and adults living with HIV are women, they, and often their health care providers, do not see them as people who could be living with HIV. This paper, based on photo elicitation interviews with 22 HIV positive women, explores the impact of invisibility in the lives of HIV-positive women, focusing on diagnosis and initial disclosure to family and friends. Invisibility is a double edge sword for women. Because they are not seen as potential carriers, they have some protection from HIV-related stigma and some control over disclosure. On the other hand, their invisibility means that as a group, women are less likely to think about prevention and are more likely to get diagnosed later in the disease. Furthermore, the unique needs of women for case management and wrap-around services as part of their HIV-treatment are ignored in public policy. The importance of framing invisibility as a social justice issue will be explored.

Seeing Islam in Global Cities: A spatial semiotic analysis Jerome Krase, Brooklyn College, City University of New York [email protected] Timothy Shortell, Brooklyn College, City University of New York [email protected]

At present, examination of the visual semiotics of difference is especially important as American and European cultures interact with Islamic cultures. Visual representations of Islam are common in the US and EU; these are generally negative and often derogatory, as a quick Google image search reveals. Local political talk about Islam tends to be critical and often panicked. Nativist politics are on the rise throughout the West and the central point of contention seems to be visibility. The “burqa controversy” in France and the conflict over a Muslim community center in lower Manhattan (the so-called “WTC mosque”) are recent examples of the disputes over urban public space involving representations of collective identity. Public space becomes the locus of the public sphere, where visibility conflicts—who is seen in public space—become disputes about who ought to be included in the national “public.” Using a spatial semiotic analysis, we investigate how the presence of expressive, conative, phatic, and poetic signs of recent Muslim inhabitants change the meaning of vernacular neighborhoods in global cities. Visual data from urban neighborhoods in the US and Europe will be presented as examples of different functions of semiotic markers, and exemplars of the data we collect using a neighborhood photographic survey technique. We discuss how these different functions interact with local policy to create interpretive landscapes, which can lead to dramatically different outcomes in terms of social conflict.

In/visibility of Undocumented Latino Immigrants in the News Media Marisol Clark-Ibáñez, California State University San Marco [email protected]

This paper explores how the newspaper circulation portrayed Latinos undocumented immigrants in a three-month period. We drew upon an invisibility framework and social constructionism to conduct two types of content analysis for seven news media outlets: three large national (New York Times, Washington Post and CNN), two from Southern California region (Los Angeles Times and San Diego Tribune), and two local papers in Southern California (North County Times and Orange County Register). This resulted in 107 news articles in our dataset. First, we analyzed “invisibility” through images, quotes, and language. We found undocumented Latinos immigrants rendered invisible through these news stories. Second, we used an inductive approach and analyzed what was discussed when undocumented Latino immigrants were in the news. Abstract discussions of immigration and immigrants were the most popular topics (i.e., policy, state specific issues, politics), followed by various topics related to law enforcement (i.e., deportation, crime, border), and then less popular were potentially more positive or compelling portrayals of undocumented Latino immigrants (e.g., social justice, human interest). Our project serves as a starting point to further understand the use of invisibility in the media, power, inequality, and the cultural context of undocumented Latino immigrants.

2.1.2 Imagination and the Use of Visual Projections as Elements of Mass Perceptual Modification in Civilizational Transformation and Conscious Evolution (Bayer Hall 103)

Pictures of Possible Futures of Pasts that were and Presents that May Be Nirmalan Dhas, Independent Researcher, Sri Lanka [email protected]

From relicts from the present we piece together pictures of pasts, from which we extrapolate possible futures. Anchored in the present we paint pictures that map out pathways to the futures we perceive, building them into the dreams of our children. Let us visualize a pathway to a credible future and examine a possible process by which it may be projected and activated within minds that are ready and willing to establish its reality and function as guides to those who would choose to walk where it may lead.

The Solar Village: Prototypes for a sustainable future Brian Grieb, Morgan State University [email protected]

In our lifetime, it is estimated that we will spend 90% of our time indoors. From infancy to death, the homes in which we inhabit not only fulfill our most primal human needs for shelter and protection, but shape our global perception and influence our behavior on the planet. Unfortunately though, most of these buildings in which we spend our time waste resources, contribute to environmental degradation and consume excessive amounts of energy. It is imperative for our built environment to transform if we are to create a more sustainable civilization. One place where this transformation is being explored and a new visual experience of the built environment re-imagined is the U.S. Solar Decathlon competition. Conceived as an international competition, university teams are challenged to design, build and operate prototypical houses that demonstrate the best in sustainable, energy-efficient solutions. To create these prototypes, students, professional mentors, private industry and governmental agencies join to turn visions into reality. At the culmination of the two year project, the prototypes are assembled together to create a “solar village” where they compete in ten contests during a three week period. As part of the event, the general public is invited to explore the “Solar Village.” While the technological innovations abound, what is most striking is how many of the prototypes challenge popular perception; seeking us to rethink what defines a luxurious home. This public immersion in the village is arguably the most important aspect of the event, as it provides an opportunity for individuals to interact, discover and explore new possibilities to generate a more sustainable lifestyle.

Important Role of Visual Media in Transformation to Sustainable Habits Santiago Salazar Biermann, Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia [email protected]

Transformation of social media is creating a human conscious related to how we live in planet earth. Changes in humans occur quicker in each generation. The access to information and the vastness of visual medias has made this possible. In the last couple of years it has become an implicit law to incorporate environmental consciousness to all the aspects of human life: business, education, mobility and food. The transformation of the habits of humans requires more effort and time. In the past years the conscious of habits has been absolutely indifferent. Almost the entire world has destructive habits, although today sustainable habits also exist. The importance to create conscious between the visual media community becomes a priority. The visual media power of transformation is absolute. It’s a hopeful way of changing, transforming, and creating sustainable habits.

The Creation of Bike Share: A sociological analysis of community activism, environmentalism, and gender Nicholas Choquette, Worcester State University [email protected]

This paper presentation forwards ecofeminist theory to better understand the institutionalization of sustainable practices on a university campus. The paper documents social processes such as pollution and financial burdens that create a collective need for a bike share program on the campus of Worcester State University. From an ecofeminist sociological perspective, the paper focuses on the problem of the masculinization of public spaces through biking, bike shares and gendered inequality along with degradation of the environment and its effects on the greater community as an interconnected injustice. The paper analyzes the uses of public space, cars and bikes through a visual sociological presentation including methods of photography. Through the critical interpretation of sociological images, human interactions and cultural representations, the paper demonstrates the ambiguity of cars by monitoring the development of a bike share program. It highlights dimensions of social life, transportation, gender inequality and economics to document changes on the university campus landscape. This paper presentation spotlights social change by analyzing student grassroots movements and civic activism along with sustainable community development through eco-feminist theory.

2.1.3 Visual Scholarship in the Research University: Tensions and Opportunities (Canevin Hall 311) Panel Chair: Mimi V. Chapman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Practices of the Preachers: Exploring photographic-based research practices Cassandra Dam, University of Calgary, Canada [email protected]

This paper shares its findings from interviews with five highly respected visual researchers about the practice of generating photographs and the influence this practice has on academic visual research. In this study there is a focus on the emergence of aesthetic traditions of art photography in relation to photographic-based research traditions. Practice theory, as a theoretical framework, is used to explore reproduction of and changes in photographic-based research practices. Philosophical hermeneutics is used to interpret ranges and possibilities of different photographic practices. Visual research and photography are two established interdisciplinary practices. This research questions the relationship between them as experienced and understood by visual researchers with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Emergent themes suggest that traditions, conventions and expectations of the two practices are often taken-for-granted or left unexamined as part of academic research. The future of photographic-based visual research is influenced by new technologies, new innovations in data presentation, pop culture, career expectations and publication demands. These influences affect practitioners’ practices changing how and why researchers use visual data. Visual researchers articulate their understandings of photographic practices through language and image by recollecting through open-ended interviews and photo-elicitation. The paper reflects on visual practices as a means of developing deeper understandings for best practices in social science research.

Tensions and Opportunities: Visually-based scholarship in the research university Mimi V. Chapman, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [email protected]

As visual studies grows and becomes increasingly inter or trans-disciplinary, scholars in research universities and other settings must find ways to demonstrate the import and unique impact of visual scholarship on contemporary problems and issues. To demonstrate such impact requires being able to situate visual scholarship in theoretical traditions from disciplines in which visual scholarship is common as well as disciplines that are newcomers to the visual table. Further, to effectively “transform the gaze” in a post-industrial society, visual scholarship must demonstrate impact on post-industrial concerns. This need requires both a recognition of the theories and methods employed by visual scholars to date and a willingness to incorporate non-traditional perspectives. Specifically, applying theoretical frameworks from disciplines that are complimentary yet distinct from visual sociology, creating workable human subjects protocols in order to allow for meaningful efficacy and effectiveness testing of visual interventions, and finding measurement tools, both qualitative and quantitative, that can detect change created by visual means is critical to promoting visual scholarship throughout the academy. This paper will outline tensions that confront visual scholars in the research university using a current study funded by the National Institutes of Health, Envisioning Health, as an example of how these tensions manifest and may be overcome. Envisioning Health is grounded in a community engaged scholarship model that also influences the approach of the interdisciplinary co- investigator group.

Discovering the Past and Understanding the Present Jude England, The British Library, London [email protected]

National Libraries are well-known for their collections of books and journals, early manuscripts and incunabula, newspapers and periodicals. Collections now include born digital material as national governments extend the concept of legal deposit beyond analogue, as well as an extraordinary range of often unique visual material. The British Library, for example, holds 14,000 music videos, posters from around the world, photographs, comics and zines, news broadcasts, trade literature and market research; oral history collections include over 2,500 interviews with British artists, such as architects, painters, sculptors, designers and photographers. Furthermore, curated collections of websites cover a wide range of topics from live art and video games, to general elections and terrorist attacks, and, the initial whole UK web domain harvest in 2013 captured 1.39 billion urls. Despite the extraordinary range of content held by such memory institutions, awareness and exploitation of it remains relatively low among contemporary researchers and use involves methodological challenges. For instance, how is memory formed through the collecting and archival practices of memory institutions? What factors need to be considered when using content collected by unknown others? What impact does law on copyright and data protection have on access and usage? Additionally, the growing scarcity of resources means that memory institutions must ask hard questions as to their function, collecting and archiving policies. The purpose of this paper is to open up opportunities for research but also raise for discussion some of the challenges facing memory institutions and their contemporary collecting practice.

10:45a.m.-12:15p.m. Concurrent Sessions

Poster Presentations (Bayer Hall Foyer)

Cross-Cultural Learning About Community-based Documentary Practice: From Indonesia to Central Appalachia Maureen Mullinax, Xavier University [email protected]

This poster session will explore a cross-cultural exchange between Indonesian and U.S. independent media organizations that share a commitment to using visual images to tell significant cultural stories. Appalshop, a veteran U.S. arts organization based in central Appalachia, led the project that included eleven fledgling Indonesian organizations who focus on community-based documentary. Documentarians, media educators, and youth producers met in eastern Kentucky and Indonesia over the course of three years to share work, collaborate on productions, and learn strategies for deepening the impact of documentary practice. The exchange explored the importance of strengthening trans-local cultural production between communities facing similar restrictions to self-determination due to economic, environmental and political constraints.

The exchange opened powerful dialogues about the following: • What does sustainability mean in relation to documentary as an activist tool? • What images emerge in that process? • How can we cultivate cultural partnerships between documentary makers in the most effective and inclusive way? • How do social media transform the ability to build networks with other documentary artists both locally and trans-locally?

The session will illustrate how collaborative media production and organizational learning across global contexts can encourage new ways of thinking about and sustaining documentary practices, especially as related to the involvement of youth who feel compelled to leave their communities or abandon their cultural traditions. In addition to sharing images of the exchange, I will play clips from visual media collaborations between participants.

Single Person and Society Om Prakash Joshi, Rajasthan, India [email protected]

The Painting of Mahatma Gandhi's life story depicted and to be narrated shows how a single person has brought social change in the post Industrial period in all over the world. He saw inequality, discrimination, violence and lack of human rights in the world. He decided to fight against discrimination and inequality with non-violence and peaceful means. He used Truth as important method to bring change. He started his experiments of truth in South Africa. He coined this method as SATYAGRAH- to insist on truth. He organized people in South Africa and in India but not collected Arms. Thus non-violence and human being s became the method to fight powerful governments having armies with weapons. His theory of peaceful non-cooperation became powerful means to fight the violence and spread the idea of Human rights, equality and discrimination on the basis of color, race, caste and religion. In painting through 111 events of Gandhi's life have shown the process and method of bringing Social Change by a single person. The painting is 1260x135 Cms. in size. There is a set of 10 post cards showing his life and philosophy for participants.

2.2.1 Critical Methods of Curricular Exchange and Instruction in Visual Sociology (Bayer Hall 102) Panel Chair: José Prado, California State University

Entertainment, Sports, and the American Dream along the Alameda Corridor of South LA Damark Gresham, California State University [email protected]

In this presentation specific attention is paid to the relationship between particular media narratives in television shows Love and Hip Hop and Basketball Housewives – i.e., success is found through sports and entertainment – and the language of schooling. Specifically, where success is marketed as a commodity that can be purchased through sports and entertainment, mainstream and academic definitions of success are delivered through unfamiliar language and terms. Thus, young racial minority students in such neighborhoods as the Alameda corridor, a South LA community hard hit by racial discrimination and industrial flight, at times root their ideas of success in the familiar narratives of sports and entertainment. How urban racial minority youth adapt and reconstruct these narratives to shape their identities and aspirations is basic to the arguments raised in this panel presentation. These arguments are sure to raise important implications about mainstream definitions of the “American Dream.” This presentation closes with an evaluation and critique of the curricular and instructional design of my interaction with a community of learners with whom I pursue understanding of popular culture through visual sociology.

Imagining the Promise of Post-Secondary Education in Post-Industrial Communities Greg Lewis, California State University [email protected]

This panel presentation examines the images of professors in an increasingly devalued urban post-secondary educational environment. Particular attention is placed on media portrayals with which the public is targeted. The tentative argument here is that such media portrayals occlude the trend toward the employment of larger proportions of adjunct professors in higher education. One apparent consequence of this is that the publics’ perceptions of higher education are grounded in vague notions around the culture of higher education. This presentation closes with an evaluation and critique of the curricular and instructional design of my interaction with a community of learners with whom I pursue understanding of neoliberal educational reform through visual sociology.

Interpretations of Boyle Heights’ History, Future and the Push to Its Gentrification Julio Rosas, California State University [email protected]

The proximity of Boyle Heights to the Los Angeles downtown area and the corporate interests of elite economic groups are factors that have converged to push the gentrification of Boyle Heights. It appears that the production and distribution of very specific visual and discursive narratives about Boyle Heights yesterday, today, and tomorrow would facilitate this push and the corresponding exclusion of one of the most historically rich Mexican and Mexican American niches in the United States. Thus, it is through this presentation that I propose to situate very specific images about the racial and ethnic legacy of Boyle Heights to the economic interests of particular corporate entities in and around Los Angeles. This presentation closes with an evaluation and critique of the curricular and instructional design of my interaction with a community of learners with whom I pursue understanding of neoliberal housing agendas through visual sociology.

2.2.2 IVSA Past, Present, and Future, A Round Table Discussion (Bayer Hall 103)

Douglas Harper, Duquesne University, President, IVSA, [email protected] John Grady, Wheaton College, Past President, IVSA, [email protected] Jon Rieger, University of Louisville, Past Secretary/Treasurer, IVSA, [email protected] Charles Suchar, DePaul University, Past President, IVSA, [email protected]

This roundtable invites reflection on the origins and thirty-one year history of the IVSA, and the alternatives we imagine for our future. We invite participation from the audience as we contemplate the next stage in our development.

2.2.3 Symbolic Meanings (Canevin Hall 311)

Flyaway Girls and Earthbound Boys: Gendered text and image in infant clothing Robert A. Brooks, Worcester State University Alain D. Blunt, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth [email protected] [email protected]

Clothing is a medium of the everyday through which identity is displayed, performed, and interpreted. Clothing that features text or image provides further potential for the public communication and interpretation of identity. Children’s clothing is particularly heavily “messaged” yet there is very little research regarding the construction of children’s identities through clothing. Drawing from a qualitative content analysis of a large sample of infant clothing, we demonstrate what amounts to a practice of “gender branding” that almost invariably constructs and reinforces rigid, essentialist notions of gender. Goffman’s “gender displays” offers a starting point for analysis; however, the uniqueness of the medium here (children’s clothing), along with its decontextualized visual displays, requires an expanded set of constructs. We demonstrate that the infant clothing in our sample constructs the “proper” boy and girl through a rich visual vocabulary of text/image that utilizes nine aspects of relative “weight” across four dimensions: affection, ascription, aspiration, and attitude. We show how the various aspects of weight are adjusted within a particular text/image such that the overall visual balance tips heavily toward either pole of the gendered continuum, akin to how a sound mixer might create more bass or treble. The result is clothing that offers a disappointingly retrograde visualization of stereotypical gender roles and ideologies.

Prerequisites for Visuality Becoming in the Information Society Olga Shuster, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia [email protected]

Today information transmission in its classical sense is not a goal of communication anymore. And there are several reasons for that. First of all, social behavior is always oriented towards others. In the 21-st century a real reason for interaction is to present oneself to others. The medium is not just the message; it is the message (most often visual) about the social status of the addresser. Secondly, as a result of the expansion of service sphere, interaction becomes a significant part of labor relations and the labor itself becomes more qualified. However, thirdly, mass education gives birth to the narrow qualified specialists, who are only good at what they are doing and have limited capacity for perception and interpretation of information. The fourth reason is a mass media that creates a need to transmit huge volumes of information for a large distance in the shortest time and with minimum distortions in interpretation. Therefore the notion of efficiency becomes very important in modern communication. Thus, there is a tendency to simplify communication and make it accessible to a general audience. Visual messages, such as photography, clothes, interiors and profiles in social networks do not require special skills for interpretation. That is why visual communication becomes one of the main aspects of the modern society. This is the end of the Gutenberg galaxy of text communication and transition to a new type of society with an image-based visual quasi space.

484 Manifestations of the Ordinary: The materiality and morality of found polaroids Kyler Zeleny, Carleton University, Canada www.kylerzeleny.com

This paper explores the discovery of 484 banal and aging Polaroid images. These Polaroids are the accumulated moments of another man’s life. Documented are his friends and family in familiar poses, their birthdays, drinks, pets, laughs and private spaces. The paper outlines the process taken to deconstruct the lot with the anticipated goal of making sense of the chaotic batch from the position of the uninitiated outsider. At times the images are highly conventional, appearing as if they belong to not one family album but many, to mine and to yours. Building upon the literature in the field (J. Hirsch, M. Hirsch, P. Holland, M. Langford, Jo. Spence, V. Williams), I look to explore the relevance and sanctity of both the family album and the physical image. I will discuss the transmissions and transactions that occur when private images enter the public domain. The article, acting as a detailed case study, is a platform for the discussion of morality in relation to private images in public view. Durkheim’s views on what is sacred and profane are used to establish a moral connection. As well, relevant and contemporary photographic publications will be discussed including the work of Arianna Arcara, Luca Santese and the prolific Erik Kessels.

Food Art-vism Elaine de Azevedo, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Brazil Yiftah Peled, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Brazil [email protected]

Discussions on cultural activism are the base of this study. Cultural activism considers artistic practices as a form of intervention in society that can happen in informal public or private spaces, transforming art in a specific form of sociability. The article aims to explore the 'food art- vism' defined here as critical and/or dialogical artistic practices that incorporate food activism or feeding inspired by political or socio-environmental issues. One is interested in the use of food as a symbolism builder and a process of digestion of beliefs and collective representation. To fulfill this goal, the text uses authors involved in the discussion on community-based artistic projects and relational and dialogical art, as well as studies on food activism and contemporary artists that use the theme in their projects. The idea is to bring up more fluid and creative ways and methods to approach social problems.

1:30 p.m.-3:00 p.m. Concurrent Sessions

2.3.1 New Ways to Record and Interpret Social Life (Bayer Hall 102) Panel Chair: David Redmon

Documentary Film as Scholarship Beverly Yuen Thompson, Siena College [email protected]

With the rise of the digital camera, it is easier than ever for qualitative sociologists to capture their research field visually, providing more information and more distribution options for our research. Creating visual images—photographs and video—also provides more venues in which we can present our work, both scholarly as well as popularly. Visual images also provide ethical dilemmas, such as showing the faces of participants and documenting real locations. In my research, I have created both short and feature length documentary videos that explore various sociological topics: social movements, tattoos and sex workers. I will be sharing video clips from these projects as well as addressing the array of issues related to creating visual scholarship.

Visualizing Neighborhood Change David Schalliol, University of Chicago [email protected]

Popular discourse about the movement of commodities often obscures how the built environment is constructed to meet production and transportation demands. Few cities know the effects of these systems as well as Chicago, where geographic location and railroad development fueled its 19th Century expansion – and now create new dilemmas with the rise of intermodal shipping and just-in-time business models. Numerous public and private entities are grappling with these changes on the city’s South Side, where transportation company Norfolk Southern is doubling the size of its 47th Street Terminal by acquiring adjacent properties and displacing more than 400 families. For more than two years, the author has been producing an ethnographic film in the neighborhood directly affected by these plans. The in-progress film investigates the tangible tensions between the pressures of contemporary transportation policy and local residents by tracing the legal machinations required for such a project and following neighbors as they live on borrowed time, maintaining friendships and traditions while struggling with new problems in their vanishing community. In so doing, the film demonstrates how institutional actors and informal actions collide to (re)produce place through simultaneous acts of creation and destruction. This presentation will draw from more than 200 hours of video to emphasize how the audiovisual documentation and presentation of the landscape can help clarify how our communities are constructed by broader social forces.

New Cultures of Diversity in Two Old Cities Diane Grams, Yale University [email protected]

New Orleans and Barcelona provide insightful cases to study the meanings of street performance in two cities renowned for their lively and diverse street cultures. In both cities, the history of national and cultural conflict is also the history of multicultural intermixing of French, Spanish, American, African and Indigenous people. Survival, morality, courage, justice, creativity, eroticism and desire inform cultural border crossing and fusion displayed in contemporary street performance. While in New Orleans, narratives of courageous resistance to the stark history of African and Indian subordination bubble to life in street performance and display; the visceral presence of Barcelona’s national struggle for a Catalonia, between Spanish, and French nationhood is diffused through seemingly unfettered cultural display and public street performance in every nook and cranny of its Ciutat Vella. This paper employs a cultural sociology framework to analyze hd video documentation of performance and subsequent interviews gathered between 2003 and 2013 in the two cities. Through comparisons of collective performance in weekly second line parades in New Orleans and break dancing in Barcelona, I analyze the narratives of human agency involved in producing street culture and learn how the streets enable engaged diversity and shared ownership of space in otherwise highly regulated and exclusive places. Such performances involve claiming public space for personal use, while enabling escape from the struggles of subordinated existence in everyday life into life as citizens both empowered and admired.

Wild Asses in a Total Institution, or Ethnography as Choreography Method David Redmon, Dawson College [email protected]

As an ethnographic filmmaker, I am interested in how to become immersed inside the fabric of encounters that occur between humans and animals as “an experience.” Immersion into “an experience,” to borrow a phrase from John Dewey’s Art as Experience, is crucial to how I approach the practice of “choreographic ethnography.” I have recently been exploring the choreography of everyday experiences among herds of donkeys inside human-made environments, or what Erving Goffman calls “total institutions.” Choreographic ethnography entails spending extensive time observing the motion of donkeys, their behaviors, and their patterns of interactions without initially visually or aurally documenting them. Choreographic ethnography is a pre-selection of carefully observed patterns of motions that form an experience – ways of motion through sounds, walking, eating, or looking/perceiving. The motions that I have chosen to include in the samples in this panel are based on extensive notes as long-takes, and happy accidents.

2.3.2 Imagining Development: Exploring functions of participatory visual practices in contemporary international development (Bayer Hall 103) Panel Chair: Maria Cieszewska-Wong

Imagining Development Global, Multidisciplinary Research Maria Cieszewska-Wong, Independent Socio-Visual Specialist [email protected]

The visual has long acted as a tool to promote and support international development, the main response to the global, post-colonial order since the 1950s. Today, the international development industry is on the edge of chaos, or as some more critically state, way beyond that edge. Development agencies, research institutes and governments, often overwhelmed by increasingly more complex development challenges, have started looking into alternative, innovative and creative ways to accompany research, generate knowledge and communicate. Participatory visual approaches and their potentials have started being recognised on many different levels by different development actors almost two decades ago. However promising, the deployment of these is often narrowed to representational aspects or functions, predominantly as communication tools. Research methods, more general participatory processes and actors positionalities’ are often misunderstood and miss contextualised. At the same time, these lack of reflective practice results in ambiguous, often un-examined conclusions of such practices, thereby undermining and limiting potentials of participatory visual approaches all together.

Co-operative Images: Fostering productive collaborations between photo-documentists and humanitarian groups through participatory action research Alan Hill, Griffith University, Australia [email protected]

This paper outlines the development, and work in progress, of a PhD research project exploring the potential for participatory action research (PAR) approaches to successfully integrate the goals and work of humanitarian development projects with the creation of communication tools. Moving away from the established photo-voice and participatory video practices that hand over the tools of visual production, this project is predicated on a new model for collaboration between visual practitioner-researchers, humanitarian development organisations and the communities they work with that is, at once, extradisciplinary and mutually respectful of the skills and knowledges within the collaboration. The proposal is that emancipating the visual practitioner to engage in PAR processes, in partnership with the other parties, will allow the creation of visual tools that go beyond the all too common pre-meditated and pre-determined marketing-based visual communication approaches currently relied upon by most organisations in the sector. The proposed methodology borrows from the conventions of photo-documentary practice, which can be conceived of as a form of PAR, and aims to establish a framework that would encourage more frequent and richer collaboration between photo-documentary practitioners and humanitarian development organisations. The paper is based in the experience of the author working with the Pratyasha Foundation, whose work addresses the educational and other needs of underprivileged children in Guwahati, India and the Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy who co-ordinate a variety of indigenous rights-based activities in Brisbane, Australia, and contains early visual collaborations with these organisations.

Empowering with Cameras: Reflecting on NGO use of participatory photography as an alternative communicatory strategy Tiffany Fairy, Goldsmiths University, London E:[email protected]

Recent decades have seen a mushrooming in projects based around a ‘NGO-model’ of participatory photography that professes to empower, give voice, enable change and provide an alternative view. Given these grand claims it perhaps unsurprising that these projects have become the subject of critique standing accused of tokenism, ‘ambivalent neo-colonialism’ (Ballerini 1995:85) and even exploitation. Commentators have questioned project’s participatory credentials and queried their value beyond creating pretty pictures for NGO brochures. Doubting questions of ownership and authorship in participatory photography, Ballerini goes so far as to ask, ‘whose pictures are these?’ (1995:88). Using research conducted with Heads of Photography at major UK NGOs this paper will reflect on the use of participatory photography as an NGO communicatory tool. While participatory visual communications is ‘of the moment’, an examination of their actual use by NGOs shows communications departments have been slow to adopt their implementation beyond one-off contained projects. The reasons for this reluctance are examined and it is argued are reflective of tensions that not only define participatory visual projects that seek to ‘empower’ within a NGO framework but also the humanitarian visual project more broadly. While some have declared the ‘NGO-model’ of participatory photography broken this paper argues for a re-imaging of the participatory photography process that will open up conversations about its practice and enable it to reclaim its emancipatory potential.

Participatory Research and Beyond: Reflecting the involvement of participants within the implementation of results Johannes Marent, University of Technology Darmstadt, Germany [email protected]

Health promotion programs frequently fail to respond to adolescents’ demands, and thus face relatively poor acceptance. The ‘expertise’ about what healthy behavior is does not add up with orientative knowledge of everyday life of adolescents. In the context of a regional (Vorarlberg/Austria) health promotion project, adolescents have reflected upon their perspective on health and wellbeing. Photovoice was used as participatory research method. Forty-five teenagers produced photographs about their lifeworlds and their perception of health. Afterwards, they have verbally presented their own works and discussed these photographs with each other. The discussions have been recorded and transcribed, and together with the photo material, have been analysed by means of documentary method. The results of the needs assessment have been presented to the stakeholders and public audience. The presentation will focus on what succeeded the participatory research process and will raise the question if and how adolescents have also been involved in the implementation of the results in practice. Was their ‘advocacy’ after the data collection still demanded? And more directly: Was participation used to ‘legitimatize’ decisions already made before or has it ‘performed’ new ideas carried out of the research process?

2.3.3 Changing Health Behaviors with Visual Images (Canevin Hall 311) Panel Chair: Lyndsay Fluharty, University of Colorado

A Content Analysis of Stock Photography Sites’ Representation of Minority Populations Lyndsay Fluharty, University of Colorado [email protected]

An exploratory content analysis was conducted using a sample of existing photos from seven large stock art suppliers. Two research assistants (RAs), blind to study intent, independently coded stock images and documented shortcomings using a coding protocol assessing a variety of racial, social, physical, and setting characteristics. Results indicate there is very little diversity in online commercial stock art photography. While gender diversity is easy to find, age was not diverse, with infants, teens, and older adults uncommon. Racial diversity was low. Hispanic ethnicity was difficult to ascertain. No photographs depicted low SES persons and only 1% of high SES persons. Other than being outdoors or indoors, most settings were indistinguishable. Also, 99% of the sample showed attractive persons. Thus, the study showed that it is difficult to obtain photographs that depict anything other than beautiful, somewhat affluent, and young to middle-age adults from large stock art companies. Diversity of health conditions was very low, too. Few overweight, obese, or underweight persons were depicted. Coders infrequently saw health behaviors, the most common being physical activity (12% of photos). These findings suggest the need for stock sites to expand their libraries so as to more accurately represent the diverse population of the US. The findings also indicate the lack of image variety available for public health practitioners to use in health education materials.

Importance of Visual Images in the Health Care Industry Wambui Loice Gichuki, University of Nairobi, Kenya [email protected]

In a developing country in Africa like Kenya, people are affected by many chronic diseases such as HIV, Cancer, Diabetes, Polio and Tuberculosis. The main reasons for these health disparities are because of factors such as poverty, environmental threats, inadequate access to healthcare, and also education inequality. The factors above make individuals irresponsible, ignorant and careless. HIV is more prevalent as people are ignorant to use protection and get tested. Tuberculosis is mostly common in congested areas. Cancer is a major issue as most people lack knowledge about it; they don’t go for check up till it’s too late. Diabetes is a disease brought by poor eating habits and lack of insulin, Polio is brought about by lack of immunization among infants. The government can use visual images to play a major role in bringing positive change of behavior as well as reducing health disparities. Billboards can be used to show the importance of knowing your HIV status for positive living. Pictures showing what liver cirrhosis do to the human body can be used to discourage people off cigarette smoking. Illustrations can be used to help the illiterate people on how they should take their medicines example the ARVs. Graphs can be used to show levels of certain diseases example HIV hence decreasing promiscuity in those areas. Advertising can also play an important role in behavior change e.g. discouraging unprotected sex and discouraging stigma. Posters can be strategically placed to emphasize on certain campaigns example sensitizing on polio immunization.

3:15 p.m.-5:00 p.m.

Documentary Film (Bayer Hall auditorium) Girl Model (72 min.) David Redmon [email protected]

Despite a lack of obvious similarities between Siberia and Tokyo, a thriving model industry connects these distant regions. Girl Model follows two protagonists involved in this industry: Ashley, a deeply ambivalent model scout who scours the Siberian countryside looking for fresh faces to send to the Japanese market, and one of her discoveries, Nadya, a thirteen year-old plucked from the Siberian countryside and dropped into the center of Tokyo with promises of a profitable career. After Ashley’s initial discovery of Nadya, the two rarely meet again, but their stories are inextricably bound. As Nadya’s optimism about rescuing her family from their financial difficulties grows, her dreams contrast against Ashley’s more jaded outlook about the industry’s corrosive influence. Girl Model is a lyrical exploration of a world defined by glass surfaces and camera lenses, reflecting back differing versions of reality to the young women caught in their scope. As we enter further into this world, it more and more resembles a hall of mirrors, where appearances can’t be trusted, perception become distorted, and there is no clear way out. Will Nadya, and the other girls like her, be able to find anyone to help them navigate this maze, or will they follow a path like Ashley’s, having learned the tricks of the labyrinth but unable to escape its lure? (Written by Kristina Aikens)

David Redmon received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University at Albany, State University of New York. Redmon is the director of Mardi Gras: Made in China (2005), Kamp Katrina (2007), Intimidad (2008), Invisible Girlfriend (2009), Girl Model (2011), Downeast (2012), Kingdom of Animal (2012), Night Labor (2013), and Choreography (2014). Redmon’s documentaries have premiered at Sundance, Toronto, Museum of Modern Art, and Viennale Film Festivals. His work has aired on PBS, POV, BBC, CBC, SRF, SVT, YLE, DR, ARTE, and NHK. Redmon’s forthcoming book is Beads, Bodies, and Trash (Routledge 2014). Redmon is a former Radcliffe Fellow and Film Studies Fellow at Harvard University and is currently a Lecturer in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent at Canterbury.

3:15-5:00 Workshop I (Bayer Hall 102) Exploring Gentrification: An Italian American neighborhood in Pittsburgh Jerome Krase & Timothy Shortell [email protected] [email protected]

Jerry Krase and Tim Shortell have been exploring urban neighborhoods around the world (mostly on foot) for decades. The trip to Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield “Little Italy” provides an opportunity for workshop participants to search for visible indications of continuity and change of local culture and class. We hope to visually capture examples of such things as elusive Italian ethnic “authenticity” as well as signs of gentrification and hipsterism in its urban vernacular landscape.

Workshop II (Bayer Hall 103) Hands on Workshop on Making Ethnographic Videos Greg Scott [email protected]

This low-threshold workshop will prepare participants to conceive, produce, and edit their own ethnographic digital videos (“ethnografilms”). 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 cell phone cameras, inexpensive digital audio recording devices, available lighting, and free video editing software.

The first part of the workshop session will present a guided tour of contemporary and classic ethnografilms produced over the past 50 years. The workshop facilitator will provide a basic and practical overview of digital video storytelling approaches and techniques. 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. The second part of session will entail a dialectical, hands-on skillshare modality, wherein the facilitator and participants work together as a collective to develop, produce, and edit a short ethnografilm using participants’ cell phone cameras and editing freeware.

Workshop III (CH 311) You Wanna Do WHAT? Using visual research to forge a path to epistemological flexibility Amanda Michelle Jones, University of Chicago [email protected] Katherine Gregory, New York University and John Jay College of Criminal Justice [email protected] Molly Merryman, Kent State University [email protected] Samantha Teixeira, University of Pittsburgh and West Virginia University [email protected]

Researchers have an ethical responsibility to consider the impact our work has on the people and/or communities we study, regardless of discipline. Participatory and other visual methods support ethical responsibility by honoring the perspectives and expertise of research participants. However, most research bestows expertise upon the primary investigator and team. This poses the question, “What do we miss when research does not include the eyes, ears, voices, and actions of those whom we are researching?”

Community-based participatory research has shown how privileging participants’ voices through collaborative work not only supports ethical responsibility but also provides extraordinarily rich data through the collaborative experience. Visual methods – particularly participatory ones – enhance the lens through which we understand our respondents’ lived experiences. However while the use of visual methods in research dates back over 100 years, many scholars face significant barriers to engaging in visual research, whether participatory or not. Larger institutions and funders often view such work as “unscholarly”, lacking rigor, or too deeply rooted in the arts.

To address this hesitation, visual scholars are invited to participate in a workshop to help rising scholars prepare for research careers using visual methods, particularly in the absence of resources or support within their own institutions. Experts from various disciplines who utilize visual methods, especially participatory methodologies and/or non-positivist epistemologies will field inquiries from attendees interested in the following visual research methods. Specific issues include: · preparing for visual research; · maximizing epistemological and methodological flexibility through visual methods, while maintaining ability to converse in the language of traditional research; · job security in visual research; · managing political considerations when training for and engaging in non-positivist work.

The agenda will consist of an introduction to the topic and experts, dialogue about building a visual research career, small-group discussions, and identifying resources to support visual research careers.

5:30 pm Special Program Evening at the Andy Warhol Museum Join us for a walk downtown to the Andy Warhol Museum. Departing from Bayer Hall at 5:30 sharp. All seven floors of the museum are open until 10 p.m. and the museum features a “Good Fridays” happy hour in their cash bar. The walk will take approximately 45 minute walk. Admission to the Andy Warhol Museum compliments of the IVSA. You must bring your conference badge and will be responsible for your dinner.

Saturday, June 28th

9:00-10:30 Concurrent Sessions

3.1.1 Education (Bayer Hall 102)

Fenced Youth: A proposal of visual sociology on working with juvenile offenders Nikteha Cabrera Franco, Photo Editor Spanish service and Latin America Bureau, XInhua News Agency, Mexico. Member of the Laboratorio Multimedia para la Investigación Social (LMIS) and the Multimedia Laboratory for Social Research (LMIS), National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) [email protected]

This is a research supported by visual documentation about a cultural intervention project in a prison for juvenile offenders in Mexico City. I worked from the project: "Artistic Paths to Peace: The promotion of culture of peace with young people through the art.", as part of the Cultural Organization “Women of Fire”. This work was developed from an approach with young inmates of the Specialized Community for Teenagers Dr. Alfonso Quiroz Cuaron, considered one of the most dangerous prison for juvenile offenders in Mexico. The project with the teenagers aimed to promote the culture of peace, non-violence, human rights education and collaborative knowledge through art. The work with the young men, some of which are hired assassins, has a duration of 6 months, it began in June 2011 giving to them workshops on peace, human rights and arts, and ended in November with an artistic and theatrical performance inside the prison. During this time I documented the process as photographer and sociologist to construct an analysis on young people, poverty, violence, prison, and cultural intervention from a NGO. I present first a general description of the work of “Women of Fire” and of the logic of operation of the prison. Then I approach the cultural work with the inmates and what in this context I observed as sociologist and photographer, focused on the interaction inside a device of closure, making finally a critic on the prison model and on a society permeated by violence, poverty and lack of education.

Mapping the Present and Future: Capturing and interpreting visual representations of educational technologies in school communities Jacqueline Tinkler, Charles Sturt Universtiy and Melbourne University, Australia [email protected]

Recent international and national policy in the area of educational technologies has had a focus on preparing young people for a place in the post-industrial world. Such policies are designed to enable students to "survive in an information society", as well as "change our students into productive knowledge workers". In Australia, the so-called "Digital Education Revolution" had a range of implications for all members of secondary school communities, and their use of educational technologies. Having participants from all sections of the school community produce their own hand-drawn concept maps was a way of approaching the complexity of issues and allowing participants in the study to "map" and present their own ideas about technology and learning. Ideas from a cross section of school community members were gathered, and these data included ideas about both present and future of digital technologies for learning. This paper focuses on the capturing and interpreting of visual data in the form of hand-drawn concept/mind maps, created by various members of two secondary school communities. Issues that have arisen and approaches taken to the analysis of hand-drawn visual data will be detailed - particularly as the maps created include a range of pictorial, diagrammatical, and textual elements. The ways in which different participants produced their drawings, issues around the interpretation and analysis of the variety of visual data, intertextuality, and the ideas in the present and future maps, will be canvassed.

Seeing the Full Spectrum: The classroom through the lens Aylin Kunter Middlesex University, London [email protected]

This paper looks at the Post-industrial increase in the marketisation and commercialisation of education accelerated with government policy since the 1980s. This new public management engenders a drift toward assessing the value-addededness of staff, measured by performance targets and enacted through appraisal and capability measures. Commodification has developed through measurement of abstract standards by linking teachers’ scores with pupils’ achievements. The aim of this paper is to understand the contextual shifts within the school environment and how this affects the wellbeing of teachers through the use of interviews and focus groups. We believe that the abstract nature of work relations within the school workplace can be advantageously measured using visual methods such as Photography and Video. This paper therefore aims to capture this more holistic nature of work through photographing teachers in their school environment and their home environment. This will enable to build a 'picture' of their wellbeing analysing key symbolic factors such as dress and body language. According to Chaplin in order to consider the various ‘texts’ that contribute to a culture, it is important to consider as many of the influences as possible in the analysis. We argue that the quantification of labour, associated monitoring, and standardisation of teaching methods may weaken professional autonomy and hinder wellbeing. Using a Stress index presented by the Health and Safety Executive, coupled with visual data from photographs (self made) and video footage of focus groups, we explore the linkage between training, appraisal and reward. The second stage interprets effects of standards on professional autonomy exploring workload stress indices. Lastly, we draw conclusions for education policy.

Deconstructing the Visual Semiotics of Online Islamic Education in America Tayyab Zaidi, University of Wisconsin [email protected]

I demonstrate in this paper how the visual semiotics of online Islamic academies in America modulate the parameters and pathways of learning and thus complicate the realization of their educational objectives. Using the multimodal schemata developed by Baldry and Thibault (2005) etc I spotlight the ensemble of visual and verbal resources deployed in the service of educational programming by three major online Islamic academies in America. The analysis feeds into a larger argument about the role and efficacy of Web 2.0 platforms in the accomplishment of educational goals- in this case goals geared to the cultivation of Muslim counterpublics in America. For many Muslim educators in America, cyberspace merely signifies innovative modalities of instruction that expand and extend delivery mechanisms for pre- installed institutionalized learning systems. However, a close examination of the textuality of these virtual programs points to a conception of cyberspace that as an activity system carries its own rules and norms of engagement and interaction and that engenders new identity configurations. Decoding the visual grammar of these organizations reveals the generative role of the online medium in the formation of religious education. While Islamic educators may peddle an abstractly defined notion of religious learning, I show in the analysis how their educational aims and concerns are textually imbricated. The thick multimodality evident in the cultural motifs, the instructional architecture and the interactional protocols that Islamic academies press into service trouble the actualization of their verbally articulated program goals.

3.1.2 Urban Ethnographies (Bayer Hall 103)

Lot Lines and Tree Falls: Exploring the visual commons in an upscale community Jon Wagner, University of California-Davis [email protected]

Durkheim’s treatment of the normal and the pathological, as both situational and reciprocal, is a useful starting point for examining the “visual commons”—i.e. visual elements that residents value and affirm as purportedly common features of the community in which they live. Because these elements extend across property lines and frequently vary from one resident to the next, conflicts, negotiations, and accommodations about the visual commons are endemic and vitalizing features of community life. To explore these features further, I have been conducting a long-term participant observation study of the upscale suburban community in which I live. Using photographs and brief narrative texts, I will present two illustrative cases from that larger study. The first compares neighbor responses to two notable tree falls—a sudden, unanticipated collapse from long-term internal rot and a planned removal by an absentee landlord. The second compares how residents use landscape and hardscape elements to affirm how they think “things should look” up to and including the lot lines of adjacent properties. These and several related cases have suggested a framework for guiding additional studies of the visual commons. The framework plots flash points for residential conflict against the visibility of quite varied community features. Among the more salient of these features, I have come to identify the following: site lanes, views and vistas; paths, routes and roads; topographic obstacles, attractions and hazards; facades and screens; text messages and symbols; landmarks and blind alleys; decorations and ornaments; and destructions and reconstructions.

Seeing the City: A visual methodology for public engagement with sociotechnical futures Carlo Altamirano-Allende, Arizona State University [email protected]

During the Futurescape City Tours, citizens engaged in an urban walking experience that involved observing, documenting and deliberating about the past, present and future of technology in the urban environment. Central to this experience was the use of photography as the place of work where the citizen-photographers used a visual language to grant meaning and structure to their experience. Drawing on Barthe's (1964) notion of semiology as a construction of meaning through the exploration and identification of systematic regularities of signs and objects, as well on Benjamin's (1936) notion that there is no photography without discourse, this paper demonstrates what participants see as their relationship to their city as portrayed through photographic observations. Further, it draws from empirical data taken during the various iterations of FCT in 2013 in six cities of North America – ethnographical accounts, interviews and visual material generated – to demonstrate the various roles that the use of images play in the mediation of citizen’s experience as urban walkers: The image as 1) an eye sharpener within the visual construction of meaning of space; 2) as mediator in the power dynamics associated to deliberation practices by giving equal voice to participants within the dialogue on sociotechnical futures; and 3) as a rich source of data for the visual representation and definition of the dynamic aspects of a city’s identity based on citizen’s concerns. This research explores the relevance of visual cultures within the realm of Science and Technology Studies in order to stimulate a scholarly practice on the theory and practice of citizen engagement around issues of place and time change.

Visualizing Urban Parks: Seeing, walking and talking about green space in an environmental justice community Jonathan Strout, University of Florida [email protected]

This paper will present preliminary results of my study participating in active interviewing and walking through and to urban parks with participants in environmental justice communities of Boston, MA, exploring my experiential understanding of how people perceive the quality of open space in their communities. Similar to other major cities, the city of Boston is home to some of the most environmentally overburdened communities in the state, where certain low- income and minority neighborhoods are disproportionately impacted by environmentally hazardous sites and facilities. This study seeks to determine if certain residents of Boston are doubly discriminated against, that is, if they are burdened with a disproportionate concentration of environmental ‘bads’ and lack access to environmental ‘goods’ such as open space. The quality and usability of these spaces will be determined by the qualitative research methods in this study, such as my ‘walking photo ethnography,’ which develop new and unique ways of understanding individuals’ relationship to their environment. Following Lee & Ingold (2006), walking with others informs my own sense of place-making in the urban environment and helps frame my understanding of access to open spaces and the spatial distribution of parks in the community. Drawing upon photos taken by participants of green space in their neighborhood, and my interviews with them walking to and through places depicted in the photos, I will present preliminary findings on the place-meaning and place-making narratives people attach to open/green space in their local, urban environment.

Art of the Common: Envisioning real utopias in postindustrial Detroit Vince Carducci, College for Creative Studies [email protected]

For decades, the city of Detroit has been an icon of urban disinvestment. In recent years, the devastation has taken on a romantic patina in the photographic genre known as “ruin porn,” images of the city’s deliquescing architecture, often printed in large format with a glossy sheen, circulated in the media and exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. While the erstwhile Motor City’s identity as an avatar of modernity gone awry possesses scopophilic allure, there is another, arguably more fertile tendency that has emerged that can be termed the “art of the common.” The art of common trespasses the boundaries of conventional property relations of modern capitalism, existing in an indeterminate zone between public and private as customarily understood. The art of the common first emerged in desolate sectors of the city where the distinctions of conventional property relations had been effectively erased, in places where the abandoned landscape offered opportunities for creative agency to flourish by force of sheer will. This paper surveys the field of visual cultural production in Detroit using Ranciere’s notion of aesthetic community and Eric Olin Wright’s concept of real utopias as its primary theoretical lenses.

3.1.3 Theoretical Framing (Canevin Hall 311)

Biographical and Visual Narratives: Subjective interpretation of life experiences Hermílio Santos, PUCRS, Porto Alegre, Brazil [email protected]

This paper has the aim of presenting a tentative to adapt the well-established biographic narrative approach proposed by the German sociologist Fritz Schütze and later adapted and incremented by Gabriele Rosenthal to the analysis of what we may call here “visual narrative”, it means to video images tacked by biographical narrative interviewee. The paper first presents briefly the biographical narrative approach, focusing especially in its analytical procedures as proposed by Rosenthal, calling the attention above all to its theoretical foundation that justify the analytical steps adopted. As second step, the paper presents the procedure of data production based on the example of an ongoing empirical research on the experience of violence of young females, which aim is to understand the structure and diversity of subjective interpretations to the reality and to the “other”, based on biographical and visual narratives. As a third and final step it should be applied, in a modified way, the analysis already developed by Gabriele Rosenthal and Nicole Witte to video analysis produced by the researchers themselves. It can be anticipated that the most important distinction, besides the process of production of visual data as complement to the biographical narratives, is what we can get in terms of access to the subjective interpretation in accordance to the phenomenological oriented sociology proposed by Alfred Schutz. It should be made clear the potentiality of combining both procedures, the biographical and visual narrative, to get a better access to the complex structures of subjective interpretations of the life-world.

Images’ Social Lives Jonathan S. Marion, University of Arkansas [email protected]

Images lead multiple lives. Variances in real-time perception, combined with differing recalls, reproductions, appropriations, and remixes, all complicate any stabilization of images into a fixed set of meanings and purposes. In line with this year’s theme of “Visual Dialogues in Postindustrial Societies,” then, and related to Deleuze’s notion of intermediality, this paper examines the social lives of specific images, highlighting: (1) their social trajectories and (re- )contextualizations; (2) some of the ethical considerations and implications of producing and disseminating images within today’s media universe; and (3) the real world consequences of such considerations (such as the lack of anonymity or confidentiality when working with images). Relating to various understandings of “social lives” as applied to images—from the role of images in social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr, to the impact of images on day-to- day social relationships—to foreground how images have moved to the foreground of social life and must be taken seriously as the complex, polysemic, unwieldy contributors to social action that they have become. Our first case study comes from East Houston and underserved Hispanic teenagers’ uses of cell phone photography. In contrast, our second case study looks at competitive ballroom dancers’ use of images as professional capital and identity. With broader implications for how images are created, disseminated, and perceived in contemporary life, this paper interrogates the role of images in personal and social re/presentational processes, and how these dynamics ramify and feedback into broader circuits of social and cultural negotiations and living.

Globalization in Urban Hotspots: A visual street-level approach Luc Pauwels, University of Antwerp, Belgium [email protected]

Globalization ─ the buzzword of our era ─ usually refers to the ever increasing worldwide flow of ideas, practices, and material objects spurred by organizations and transnational institutions and resulting in increasing interdependency between people and nations across the globe. This fashionable but rather confusing term often triggers negative connotations of unbridled capitalism, ‘Westernization’(‘Americanization’), exploitation, cultural mainstreaming and unmitigated consumerism. While globalization and transnationalism may (have) come to imply all of the above, transnational action may also contribute to solving world problems and foster universal values of humanity and solidarity. However, gauging and qualifying the exact impact of globalization in different cities around the globe is a daunting task where purely quantitative approaches fall short. Visual approaches to globalization and cultural exchanges, relying on existing data from a variety of sources or using purposefully created new materials, may provide empirically grounded insights regarding concrete expressions and enactments of cultural encounters in globalizing urban hotspots and help to investigate the presumed homogenization of space as a result of cultural and economic globalization and more importantly, reveal the local, national and regional articulations of globalization trends. The central - photographic - part of this presentation opts for a metaphoric and metonymic approach to the observable effects and shapes of globalization and cultural hybridization. The selected photographs were mostly produced in so-called ‘global cities’ or ‘world cities’. These are cities that are believed to play a strategic role in the process of globalization by linking major economic regions into the world economy.

Black Masks and Spirit Fingers: The role of destruction in the creation of another possible world Marie Skoczylas, University of Pittsburgh [email protected]

Inspired by the uprisings of the Arab Spring and the anti-austerity demonstrations in Europe, Occupy joined the global protest arena in the fall of 2011. Tens of thousands of people in the U.S. and around the world questioned the legitimacy of existing institutions and sought to create a movement based on non-hierarchical relationships and direct democracy. Participants claim that vital to these aims is the destruction of neoliberal ways we have been socialized to relate to one another, and the creation of alternative societal relationships. In this paper, I first analyze images of the prefigurative practices in Occupy camps to interpret the ways participants sought to alter unjust power relations and model their visions of another possible world. Secondly, I compare images of confrontational protest tactics, such as black bloc marches and property destruction, with written arguments by Occupy movement participants for and against such tactics. I identify the different dimensions of the complex meanings participants ascribe to their actions to understand the role of confrontation in protesters’ aims of societal transformation. I argue that “performative violence” (Juris 2005) serves purposes beyond a mere aim to construct a radical identity. I explore how images of confrontational and destructive performances within a prefigurative movement can also queer scholars’ gendered understandings of aggressive protest tactics (Kolarova 2009) and have the potential to pose new challenges to corporate and state adversaries.

10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m. Concurrent Sessions

3.2.1 Pittsburgh Filmmakers on Display (Bayer Hall 102)

Apollo Welcomes You FINISH

Apes

3.2.2 Dialogues on Material Culture (Bayer Hall 103)

Post Industrialism vs. De-industrialism Rickie Sanders, Temple University [email protected]

The concept of postindustrial was introduced by sociologist Daniel Bell during the early 1970’s. It has been described in various ways. First, as a society where fundamental values are being transformed – from those that highlight the importance of acquisition and materialism to those that emphasize self-expression, personal freedom, and creativity; second, as the period of late (informational) capitalism where production of knowledge, information, services, and the impact of experts comes to dominate; third, a world where fixed identities are replaced by those that are competing and seemingly contradictory. Finally, similar to post-modernity, post- colonialism, post-racial, and post Fordism; postindustrial society has come to signal a profound shift in consciousness, perspective, and values. It is also credited with raising living standards and even curbing pollution. Post industrialism is a highly complex arena where tensions, resonances, and dialectics often generate more heat than light. Critiques range from the Neo Marxist allegations that nothing fundamental has changed in the new postindustrial society (Soja, 1996) to questioning whether it represents prosperity or decline (Samuelson, 2013). Finally, and perhaps most damaging; others have suggested when mapped, the resulting geo- visualization clearly points to the highly Euro and Western-centric nature of post industrialism. This is problematic and might point to theoretical impotence.

Visual Conversations: Forms of participation in, and engagement with, architecture Cristina Garduño Freeman, Deakin University, Australia [email protected]

In recent years, architecture has again become concerned with the idea of public participation. Scholars, such as Paul Jones, Paul Jenkins and Lesley Forsyth, among others have taken up the academic study on how ‘the public’ can take part in the complex process of planning, designing and constructing their built environment. The use of traditional qualitative methods; interviews, workshops, surveys, discussion groups and advisory committees is central to this approach. The advent of social media platforms is opening up new ways and sites for engaging with individuals, groups, communities and organisations. Further, these online platforms are also public repositories where ‘visual conversations’ around architecture is taking place. Whilst established methods for public participation are a means for including the wider public in the development of architecture, this approach does incorporate the potential of representations to be a means for, and site of, public communication and participation around architecture. Using Henry Jenkins theory of participatory culture and Terry Smiths concept of the iconomy, the paper will explore how representations of architecture circulating in social media could be understood as a form of visual conversation. The paper will argue that such an approach makes a valuable contribution to the existing discourse on architecture and participation.

Resuming the Authentic City: The past as touristic appeal and self-assurance Johannes Marent, University of Technology Darmstadt, Germany [email protected]

‘Istanbul ... the most inspiring city in the world’: This slogan supports a magnificent panorama of the city’s historical peninsula. The image-text of interest is a scripted gaze, created, in order to welcome international visitors to the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture event. The city’s façade high- lights its long history while the picturesque photograph is fading out the modern face of the city. Why does the advertising image perpetuate nostalgia instead of representing ‘the future’ to the world? Skylines and panoramic views of cities have always effectively activated fantasies of the beholder. Above all, in the post-industrial area cities work carefully on their iconic representation to attract tour- ists, knowledge-workers, and investors. Nevertheless, they haven’t caught wide scholarly attention. This presentation will focus on how marketing images can be used as empirical data for urban re- search. The analysis of the image campaign Istanbul 2010 underpins photo elicitation as well as inter- views with the campaign creators, and document analysis of the media response. It will demonstrate that the specific picture consists of two interlacing logics, which are termed with the analytical catego- ries ‘the imperialistic logic’ and ‘the orientalistic logic’. The former represents hegemony of power (religious and political) while the latter stands for a melancholic gaze towards bygone times. Hence the picture ‘works’ both for the international target audience – which gets proved within its ‘western gaze’ and is attracted by the possibility of experiencing the oriental exotic –, and for specific groups within the city that can identify themselves with the demonstration of hegemonic power.

The Post-industrial Laboratory: A collaborative inquiry into the impact of temporary site- based art Sean Derry, Indiana University of Pennsylvania [email protected]

For nearly a century a collection of blast furnaces known as the Carrie Furnaces transformed raw materials into molten iron and sustained the livelihoods of numerous communities in Pittsburgh’s Monongahela Valley. With the quieting of the furnaces in the early 1980’s, the principle force that defined this site vanished. In 2012 Pittsburgh artists Sean Derry and Chris McGinnis began work on a community-based initiative developed for the Carrie Furnaces National Historic Landmark. This project would become Alloy Pittsburgh. Alloy Pittsburgh established a forum where artists and communities came together to reimagine their surroundings. The project was founded with the desire to cultivate ambitious visual and performing arts projects that explore the creative reuse of the post-industrial landscape. Alloy Pittsburgh built upon the region’s history by formalizing an ongoing collaborative program designed to foster new community partnerships, celebrate novel ways of reimagining familiar places and advance the careers of emerging artists from the region. During the summer and fall of 2013 Alloy Pittsburgh engaged fifteen emerging visual and performing artists through an immersive research residency, interdisciplinary public lecture series and group exhibition. These events took place on site at the Carrie Furnaces as well as numerous venues in the surrounding communities of Braddock and Homestead. The program was founded on a belief in the necessity for participation, dialogue and action within the post-industrial landscape. Bringing these works of art to life created a space of possibility at a site once defined by the singular pursuit of iron.

3.2.3 Photovoice (Canevin Hall 311)

Prayer Sightings Kevin L. Ladd, Indiana University-South Bend [email protected]

Visually oriented language is a part of many prayers: "Prayer helps me see God's plan more clearly." We explore links between how people engage spirituality via prayer and how they literally see the world around them. We hypothesized, for instance, that people with prayers focused on personal concerns would photograph "close-ups" or self-referential material. Those who prayed mostly for others would return photos containing substantial numbers of people and other-referential material. As part of a larger investigation of prayer, participants (N = 120) each were given a digital camera for 1 week. They were asked to photograph sights they deemed "spiritually or prayerfully important." Upon completion, participants verbally described each picture. Photos (approximately 2300) were hand coded by teams of two independent researchers. Results largely support the hypotheses and suggest novel ways to use visual stimuli to address conflict resolution in spiritual settings by having people "see through the other person's spectacles."

(Re)visualizing Homeless Experiences in the City of Chicago: Notes from the field Natalie Robinson, University of Liverpool, U.K. [email protected]

This paper offers some observations on my current fieldwork in Chicago, which seeks to present a nuanced account of homelessness using participatory visual methods. Drawing on the early ethnographic work of the Chicago School, my doctoral research aims to creatively (re)map the present-day ‘homeless city’ through photovoice. Inviting individuals to take part in street- photography, the project attempts to reframe the gaze, looking at Chicago from the vantage point of people who identify as homeless. The focus is on the relationship between individuals and the city, elucidating diverse experiences of space and place through taking and talking about urban images. It is my hope that this work will open up a dialogue between homeless individuals themselves and key decision makers, speaking to public awareness, urban planning, policy and service providers. For the purpose of this presentation I will focus on the theme of urban in/exclusion, raising questions about the homeless ‘right to the city’.

Role Reversal: When interviewers are the focus of the interview Ric Curtis, John Jay College of Criminal Justice Joshua Eichenbaum, John Jay College of Criminal Justice [email protected] [email protected]

Video recording ethnographic interviews usually has research subjects in front of the camera and researchers behind it. In this presentation, the script is flipped: the research subject is behind the camera and the interviewer is in front of it. This method of interviewing has been especially useful for research projects that involve people who might not want to be on camera: criminals, drug users and dealers, sex workers and victims of violence, for example. This short presentation provides examples from our various projects that employ this technique with hidden populations, and it discusses the ethical problems in using visual presentations of data in this fashion, including actual examples of ethical issues that have arisen in the course of using these visual data.

12:30-1:30 IVSA BUSINESS MEETING (Duquesne Union 119) ALL PARTICIPANTS: PLEASE ATTEND! (lunch provided)

1:30-3:00 Concurrent Sessions

3.3.1 Integrating Ethnographic Film into Mainstream Social Science (Bayer Hall 102) Round Table Discussion, Panel Chair: John Grady

John Grady, Wheaton College [email protected] David Redmon, University of Kent [email protected] Greg Scott, DePaul University [email protected] Jon Wagner, UC Davis [email protected]

3.3.2 Using Photography (Bayer Hall 103)

Folk Semiotics and the Photographic Conjuring of Virtual Selves: An Inadvertent Case Study Michael Schwalbe, North Carolina State University [email protected]

Erving Goffman held that the self is a dramatic effect—a virtual self -imputed to an actor based on his or her expressive behavior in an encounter. From this dramaturgical perspective, the signifying elements in a photographic image of an actor can be understood to create a virtual self no less real than a self-created in face-to-face interaction. What this depends on, however, is a folk semiotics of photographic interpretation. By this term I mean commonsense understandings of photographic indexicality, iconicity, and image-making, or what Peirce called the “collateral knowledge” that is essential to all sign interpretation. In this presentation, I will show approximately fifty portrait images of Josh, a now-deceased friend who suffered from bipolar disorder. I will show how the dramaturgical framing of these images, combined with their folk semiotic interpretation, conjures a progressively complicated virtual self. I argue that an examination of this process can yield insight into how virtual selves are created in everyday life and into the phenomenology of response to photographic portraits. I hope also to offer conceptual clarity about how portraits work, rejecting claims that they convey or depict interiority. What they do, I argue, is to invite inference, which is no more or less than any signifying surface can do.

Imaging Hong Kong: Gazing and Glancing in Three Photography Works Jackie Jia Lou, City University of Hong Kong [email protected]

From geography to sociology, from art history to anthropology, ‘landscape’ has been increasingly reconceptualized as a way of seeing rather than a mere backdrop for human activities. This shift in theoretical perspective entails a necessary change in methodological approach. The objective of research on urban landscape, for example, is no longer to depict a bird’s eye view of a place through a sustained, inquisitive gaze of the researcher, but to capture a montage of glances as experienced by the pedestrian. This paper examines how these two ways of seeing urban landscape are combined in the works of three Hong Kong-based photographers: David Clarke’s Reclaimed Land (2002), Paul Yeung’s Advertising Billboard is Nothing (2009), and Simon Wan’s City-Glow (2009). An initial visual analysis suggests that a “culture of disappearance” is the common theme of all three works, while in-depth interviews with the photographers reveal that these representations are accomplished through different ways of looking at and engaging the vanishing landscape of Hong Kong, which are shaped by the photographers’ varied relationships to the territory, that is, their place-identities. The paper concludes by reflecting upon how the creative processes in photography can further inform innovative methodologies in social research.

Ways of Seeing the Basel Carnival Ricabeth Steiger, Swiss National Museum, Zurich, Switzerland [email protected]

The Basel Carnival, or Basler Fasnacht, is a three-day carnival that begins on the Monday after Ash Wednesday at 4 am and ends three days later at the same time. During this time the participants dominate the city, both in the streets and in restaurants and bars. Nearly twenty thousand participants dress in costumes that render them unidentifiable and they often mimic or mock famous persons, historical figures or even animals. Parades run through the city, which becomes covered in confetti, that has a several hundred-year history. During Basler Fasnacht the city becomes a catharsis of history, invention and celebration. It is an urban carnival that has few if any parallels. My presentation explores ways of seeing Basler Fasnacht. A conventional documentary approach appears in 35 mm digital documentary images. The visual rhetoric of that common way of seeing is evident in the photos, which use the latest technology and documentary conventions. This visual rhetoric is compared to images made with a swing lens panorama camera, employing black and white film. With this camera movement is captured differently, context is expanded, and color disappears. My question is how one sees the same reality differently when different photographic technology is used. What do we see as two versions of the same reality, when all we do is switch cameras?

Empathy and Photography: Visualizing our Humanity Tracy Xavia Karner, University of Houston [email protected]

At the turn of the 21st century, sociologist Robert Putnam warned that bedrock of community-- our social connections to each other were disintegrating and leaving our lives and communities impoverished. He found that we were losing touch with our humanity, our sense of belonging, and our ability to care about, and be cared for, by others. Since this alarm was sounded there has been an explosion of research into the neurological basis of social connections. In this quest, scientists have focused on the role of emotions, especially empathy, in moral thought and action. This research into the workings of oxytocin, mirror neurons, and social cognition may also offer a means to understand the enduring power of photography to evoke an emotional response. Moreover, it offers interesting interpretations as to why viewers respond strongly to some images and not to others. As visual scholars, these findings can also point to possibilities for more self aware image making in our visual methods. Photography can be a transformative act for the image maker, the viewer and the community. As a medium of communication and connection, images rely on empathic impulses to go beyond social differences and engender understanding. Empathy may be in the eye of the beholder but it can also be at the heart of the photographic act. The camera, like Janus, looks both ways offering a glimpse of the maker as well as the subject.

3:15p.m.-5:00p.m.

Documentary (Bayer Hall Auditorium) Covered (58 min) Beverly Yuen Thompson [email protected]

Covered explores the world of heavily tattooed women and female tattoo artists in the United States. Within the last decade, tattoos have exploded in popularity, becoming a common body modification practice. Once only a man's domain, women now comprise fifty percent of all tattoo customers, and are becoming tattoo artists in large numbers as well. Covered takes a larger, sociological perspective on what it means to be a heavily tattooed woman in today's society--from the perspective of women themselves.

Dr. Beverly Yuen Thompson earned her MA and Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School in New York City, where her dissertation focused on the direct action tactics of the Global Justice movement from 1999-2004. Her research has focused on subcultures and identities. She currently teaches sociology at Siena College. Previously, she taught in the Women's Studies departments at Texas Woman's University and Florida International University. Her first book, Covered Women, is forthcoming with New York University Press. Covered was her first feature documentary.

Workshop I Continued (Bayer Hall 102) Exploring Gentrification: An Italian American neighborhood in Pittsburgh Jerome Krase & Timothy Shortell [email protected] [email protected]

Workshop II (Bayer Hall 103) Hands on Workshop on Making Ethnographic Videos Greg Scott [email protected]

Conference Closing Remarks (Auditorium)

Thanks everybody for coming! See you next year!