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:
“The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem.... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”
—Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)
“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)