Visual Ethnography as a Research Methodology

The chapter presents a rationale for using visual ethnography as part of the methodology in qualitative research and illustrates what visual ethnography methodology is capable of accomplishing when imagery is included in the investigative process. Visual ethnography offers a venue for collecting and analyzing data that would otherwise be inaccessible and positions imagery as an important, rather than a minimal or occasional, choice for use in qualitative research. Topics include contemporary definitions of visual ethnography and its value in qualitative research, historical applications of visual ethnographic theory that influence the way researchers view visual ethnography today, and contemporary uses of visual ethnography in data collection and analysis. Finally, the conclusion explores the future of visual ethnography.

Cultural Criminology and Ethnography

This chapter explores the many dynamics linking cultural criminology and ethnography and outlines the distinctive features of cultural criminological ethnography. The chapter first notes the ethnographic sensibility on which cultural criminology is constructed and summarizes some of the foundational ethnographies in cultural criminology. It next documents the dynamic interplay between ethnography and theory in cultural criminology, especially in regard to the concept of verstehen. The chapter then considers ethnographic innovations in cultural criminology, among them instant ethnography, liquid ethnography, visual ethnography, and autoethnography. A larger innovation is also explicated: cultural criminological employment of ethnography as an alternative epistemology within criminology, and a methodological critique of conventional criminological research. The chapter concludes with two discussions: cultural criminology’s use of ethnographic research findings as counterpoint and corrective to harmful criminal justice policies, and the trajectory of cultural criminological ethnography as it increasingly engages with interdisciplinary approaches, and explores issues of absence, drift, and ephemerality.

San Basilio de Palenque: Visual ethnography of urban art in Palenque

Este trabajo constituye una aproximación inicial a la expresión del arte callejero en San Basilio de Palenque. Para ello se aborda un enfoque cualitativo de corte descriptivo con el objetivo de analizar los usos del lenguaje visual en el arte palenquero a partir de la etnografía visual y las herramientas propias del texto visual. Para ello, se analizan piezas de varios estilos del graffiti en relación con la expresión de herramientas del lenguaje visual en las prácticas sociales y culturales documentadas de la comunidad palenquera. Entre los resultados encontrados se resaltan expresiones artísticas de resistencia y conservación de la cultura como estrategias organizativas para visibilizar las dificultades, retos y tradiciones del primer pueblo libre de América Latina.

The Banality of Digital Reputation: A Visual Ethnography of Young People, Reputation, and Social Media

This article relies on a visual ethnography with young people between 13 and 20 years old. Young people were asked to make visual collages of fictional social media accounts, which are used in this article to analyse the signification of “good” and “bad” reputation in digital youth culture. It explores how reputation is performed visually and aesthetically in digital youth culture. The aim is to contribute to the critical study of digital reputation, it formulates an ethical critique on how the signification of digital reputation has formed alongside values and beliefs that support the growth of platform capitalism, rather than assigning a reputational value and rank responsibly. I conclude how the signification of digital reputation is not only conformist and essentialist but also meaningless. The banality of reputation argues that, in the context of popular social media, there is no real or substantial information made available to distinguish between a “good” or a “bad” reputation, except for stylized banality, a stylistic focus on lifestyle and commodities. The point is that reputation should not be banal and meaningless. Many important political and institutional decisions in a democracy rely on the evaluation of reputation and critical assessment of the information upon which such evaluations are made. Although platform capitalism has made digital reputation meaningless, it is in fact an essential skill to critically orient oneself in digital societies.

Book Review: The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video

Book review of The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video edited by Phillip Vannini. It presents theoretical and empirical works on visual ethnography, applied consistently to mediatization studies.

Children helping to co-construct a digital tool that is designed to increase children’s participation in child welfare investigations in Sweden

How do children (aged 6–12 years) understand and make use of a digital tool that is under development? This article builds on an ongoing interdisciplinary research project in which children, social workers (the inventers of this social innovation) and researchers together develop an interactive digital tool (application) to strengthen children’s participation during the planning and process of welfare assessments. Departing from social constructionism, and using a discursive narrative approach with visual ethnography, the aim of the article is to display how the children co-construct the application and contribute with “stories of life situations” by drawing themselves as characters and the places they frequent. The findings show that the children improved the application by suggesting more affordances so that they could better create themselves/others, by discovering bugs, and by showing how it could appeal to children of various ages. The application helped the children to start communicating and bonding when creating themselves in detail, drawing places/characters and describing events associated with them, and sharing small life stories. The application can help children and social workers to connect and facilitate children’s participation by allowing them to focus on their own perspectives when drawing and sharing stories.

Introduction

A significant effort in theorising and conceptualising the visual has been made within various disciplines. To mention only a few, Howard Becker (Art as collective action. Am Sociol Rev 767–776, 1974) in visual sociology, Lucien Taylor (Visualising theory. Routledge, 1994), Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy ((eds): Rethinking visual anthropology. Yale University Press, London, 1999) and Jay Ruby (Picturing culture: explorations of film and anthropology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000) in visual anthropology, Chris Jenk ((ed): Visual culture. Routledge, 1995) in cultural studies, Gillian Rose (Visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual methods. Sage, 2001) in geography and Sarah Pink (Doing visual ethnography. Sage, London, 2001) in visual ethnography, all produced fundamental works focusing on the visual in social sciences. This book, however, without diminishing the disciplinary work within the subject, proposes to approach visual methodologies in the specific context of a field of study, adopting an interdisciplinary approach that brings together geography, sociology, anthropology and communication studies. As Adrian Favell (Rebooting migration theory: interdisciplinarity, globality and postdisciplinarity in migration studies. In: Brettell C, Hollifield J (eds) Migration theory: talking across disciplines. Routledge, pp 259–278, 2007, p. 1988) has suggested: “On the face of it, there could hardly be a topic in the contemporary social sciences more naturally ripe for interdisciplinary thinking than migration studies.” In this piece we will attempt to explain why the adoption of visual methodologies in the field of migration studies is of particular interest.