Visual sociology is an area of sociology concerned with the visual dimensions of social life. This subdiscipline is nurtured by the International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA), which holds annual conferences and publishes the journal, Visual Studies.
Because of the interests of its founders, the IVSA tends to be concerned with photography and documentary filmmaking within a sociological context. However, visual sociology - theoretically at least - includes the study of all kinds of visual material and the visual social world, and uses all kinds of visual material in its methodologies.
Similarly, the newly formed British Sociological Association Visual Sociology Study Group offers UK-based researchers and academics working in a broad range of sub-disciplines within sociological fields a network in which to explore existing and emerging visual research methods and methodologies.
Famous quotes containing the words visual and/or sociology:
“I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost. My wife, however, will unerringly point out that the cheese or the leftover roast is hiding right in front of my eyes. Hundreds of such experiences convince me that men and women often inhabit quite different visual worlds. These are differences which cannot be attributed to variations in visual acuity. Man and women simply have learned to use their eyes in very different ways.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)
“Parenting, as an unpaid occupation outside the world of public power, entails lower status, less power, and less control of resources than paid work.”
—Nancy Chodorow, U.S. professor, and sociologist. The Reproduction of Mothering Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, ch. 2 (1978)