2009 IVSA CONFERENCE
Bologna, Italy
July 20-22, 2010

THINKING, DOING AND PUBLISHING VISUAL RESEARCH:
THE STATE OF THE FIELD ?

CALL FOR PAPERS

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: March 30, 2010
Please send abstracts or completed papers directly to the Panel chair Ð email addresses are provided.
This only lists panels seeking papers
Fully formed panels will appear on the conference program

THEORY OF THE IMAGE

Poster/Video Session

The 2010 IVSA conference (Bologna, Italy: July 20-22, 2010 ) will have space for posters (up to 4 feet by 8 feet) and videos. Videos will be shown in rotation in our main auditorium and a special session will be organized to discuss selected works. Please send abstracts plus poster descriptions or video description to Paolo Parmeggiani at: paolo.parmeggiani@uniud.it. The submission deadline is March 30, 2010.

Panel 1: Visual Mobile Mediascape

Chair: Gaby David

Mobile mediascape is mix of cultural and institutional settings, developments, applications, business strategies and consumers' facts, and it is by accounting this multiple diversity that we will be able to better understand such a complex subject. But the mobile mediascape changes so quickly, is uncertain, and so malleable a field that it is a struggle against time to observe important and pertinent things before they are out of date. This panel aims to better understand the trends and discourses of the visual mobile mediascape; the way they affect not only how we perceive mobility, but also how we use and visually comprehend our mobile phones. What are the relations between mobile phone technologies, practices, identity formation and sociality within the digital culture? How do these complex and intertwined factors affect cultural transformations? What is visual mobility and what does it represent? What are its historical origins and these cultural mobile trends' logic? How do the cultural discourses and meta-discourses shape our understandings of what the visual mobile mediascape is? In this panel we will analyze different ways of production and consumption of visual mobile outputs.

Case studies, webnography, digital sociology, visual studies, cultural studies, visual anthropology, different approaches are welcome.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Gaby David (PhD Candidate)
Lhivic - Laboratoire d'Histoire Visuelle Contemporaine
EHESS - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Email: david@lhivic.org

Panel 2: Sociology of the visual: researching the uses of visual texts and technologically-enhanced modes of vision

Chair: Liza McCoy

This panel invites presentations that focus on visual texts, such as photographs, diagrams, and maps, or technologically-enhanced modes of vision, such as night-vision goggles or airport scanning devices, as they mediate and shape social courses of action in actual settings. Two types of presentation are sought for this panel: 1) empirical research that investigates practices (discursive, interpretive, etc.) through which specific visual texts are produced and activated or enhanced vision deployed, and 2) papers that reflect critically on research in these areas or that advance our theoretical understanding of visual practices.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Liza McCoy
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
Calgary, Alberta Canada
Email: mccoy@ucalgary.ca

Panel 3: The Indecisive Moment: Photography in the Age of Banality

Chair: Liz Murphy Thomas

In the nearly 200 years of its existence, photography presence has increased exponentially. From the days of having maybe one or two formal portraits taken in one's whole lifetime to the modern day incessant "snapshot", image making has become more and more prevalent and culturally intuitive.

Cartier-Bresson coined the term the "decisive moment" as an embracement of the modernist ideal of the "perfect" moment, a moment that a good photographer could "capture" by being in the right place, at the right time.

However contemporary photography has exceeded even this. Cameras are available and prevalent throughout our daily lives. And now with digital capture replacing traditional film, the cost of taking an image is nearly a non-factor. The result of this is a culture that creates an even greater number of images while at the same time resulting in a reduction of the "specialness" of images.

Photoblogs, social networking and paparazzi images have all contributed to a culture saturated with images of the banal. How has this ability to record infinitely affected our relationship to photography and to the image?

This Panel invites artists, scholars and image-makers to discuss the nature of images today and to share written and creative works that explore concepts related to this theme.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

thomas.liz@uis.edu

Panel 4: Domesticating the city: Visual methods and practical consciousness of space.

Chair: Giuliana Mandich (University of Cagliari).

The role of the visual in understanding the urban as a site for collective construction has already been examined in previous IVSA conferences. This panel is more specifically aimed at discussing how visual methods can be used to analyse everyday practices of the domestication of urban space. Domesticating space requires actors to be able to use it, translate it into a familiar language, turn it to their needs, and submit themselves, at least partially, to its character. Domesticating practices are therefore essential in the production of Ôontological security': when the domestication process is successful, the urban sphere becomes safer to explore, easier to cope with and more predictable to comprehend.

As a process of material appropriation, domestication is not easily described by social actors in narrative forms due to its largely unconscious form, according to what Giddens may call Ôpractical consciousness'. Visual methods (photography, videos, photo elicitation and photo production) are thus very important to the understanding of social practices of appropriation.

Papers in this Panel may either have empirical, theoretical or methodological focus and should consider such aspects as:

• the way objects (benches, fountains, all sorts of material items by which cities are occupied) are turned into a variety of uses in the process of domestication;
• the way actors with different needs (i.e. youth, women, children, elderlyÉ.); make themselves feel at home;
• how different mobilities (walking, skating, driving, biking..) take place;
• the role of boundary-making in the appropriation of space.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes

Abstracts of approximately 250 words in length should be sent as a Word document attachment to mandich@unica.it. Abstracts written in English as well as in Italian are accepted.

Panel 5: An objective gaze? Journalism, photographs and representations

Chair: Luigi Gariglio

Journalistic representations contribute to the construction of reality and to the visibility of individual and groups they show. Photographs continue today to have an important function in both online and offline illustrated press. Still images - and photographs in particular Ð continue to play a significant role both in the readers' cognitive processes and in the production of symbolic imaginary. They provide cognitive and symbolic access keys to many social worlds partially or totally inaccessible to most of the publics. Furthermore, 'agenda setting' theory has demonstrated how the print media, i.e. images and text layout, produce more effects on the public agenda and "priming" than those obtained from television (other theories may of course disagree). The photojournalism becomes therefore an interesting mirror to understand the dynamics that govern the processes of social construction of reality built by the media.

"An objective gaze?" panel welcomes contributions - both from scholars and journalists - that focus on the journalistic communication of political and social issues. Particular attention is required to the representations the media construct by means of photographs (professional or otherwise). Studies and first hand professional experiences, ranging from mainstream international newspapers to local civic journalism, both online and offline, are welcome.

Ethnographic research about photography newsmaking and about photojournalism practice are well fitting into this panel too.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Luigi Gariglio 335-6027220
Universitˆ degli Studi di Torino, Dipartimento di Studi Politici
Via Giolitti, 33 10123 TORINO
Tel. +39 (0) 116704141 - Fax +39 (0) 116704114
e-mail: luigi.gariglio@unito.it

Panel 6: How people look?

Chair: Patrizia Faccioli

This panel seeks a theoretical and methodological unity to the visual social sciences. The theme of How-People-Look as outlined by Richard Chalfen (forthcoming 2010) suggests the benefits of integrating studies of appearance and studies of observation. Appropriate topics will address connections of (1) multi-contextual and multi-modal appearance and presentations of self and (2) questions of alternative modes of looking, seeing, observation, perception and interpretation. Equally important are comments on the relevance and use of mediating scopic technologies to further understanding the cultural dimensions of "How People Look" through time and space.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Patrizia Faccioli
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology, University of Bologna
Email: patrizia.faccioli@unibo.it

METHODOLOGY

Panel 7: Integrating fieldwork methodologies using the Net and its tools

Chairs: Valentina Anzoise and Cristiano Mutti

In the last decades the visual approach in social research has been facing important changes in its tools and techniques as well as in its own objects and areas of study. The growing relevance of the Net is one of those phenomena that constitute both a new object of research and a new tool for social sciences.

The panel is open to all the contributions critically providing empirical examples of uses that have been made of the Net, and its tools, in different phases of the research design and fieldwork, but also in the didactics of social sciences and research techniques. The panel will discuss the advantages as well as the limits in the use of these tools and their integration with other techniques of research, discussing the crucial, methodological and epistemological, issues that emerge for the visual approach.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Valentina Anzoise and Cristiano Mutti
Visual Research Lab, University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
Email: valentina.anzoise@gmail.com and cmutti@sociologiavisuale.it

Panel 8: User Generated Visual: SNS and online worlds. Visual research methods

Chair: Giovanni Boccia Artieri

The Internet in itself is already a visually relevant phenomenon. The development of Social Networking Sites and online worlds (such as Second Life) is characterised by the use of images and by the way in which users generate spontaneously even iconic contents.

So the internet is a relevant place of contemporary experience and of visual analysis of individual and group life-experience. The net offers the unmissable chance of gaining useful information for sociological research in a non-directive way. In fact users share contents and materials and are "naturally" inclined to share their experiences and everyday lives.

The web is suitable, on one hand, for the specific type of research characterising sociology of images: the analysis of contemporary collective imagery, consumption processes, different forms of advertising, the use of images and the construction of identity and social networked relations, etc.

On the other hand the web makes possible also research with images: images created by users Ð researchers and subjects of research Ð could be used for photo elicitation interviews, also inworld.

This panel looks for papers based on research "in the field" about Social Network Sites (such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc.) and online worlds (such as SecondLife, World of Warcraft, etc.), to prove the possible use of visual approaches to study the web, an even more important field in socio-communicative research.

So proposals have to highlight:

• the methodological support that could be provided by the web to Visual Sociology and to sociological research;
• the benefit that Visual Sociology could provide to the analysis of the web as "inhabited" environment and priviledged place of observation of contemporary experience.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Giovanni Boccia Artieri
University "Carlo Bo" Urbino
Email: giovanni.bocciaartieri@uniurb.it<

Panel 9: Visual Research 2.0

Chair: Dee Britton

How has the emergence of technology changed visual research? Web 2.0 are applications that enable the sharing of information and include web-based communities, social networking sites, photo and video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies. Do these types of applications require methodological tools that are different from traditional visual research? This panel calls for papers that focus upon Web 2.0 research projects or discuss how Web 2.0 applications may be used in the teaching of visual research methods.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Dr. Dee Britton
Assistant Professor, Area Coordinator, Mentor
Social Sciences, Center for Distance Learning, SUNY Empire State College
111 West Avenue, Saratoga Springs NY 12866
518.587.2100 ext. 2875
Email: Dee.Britton@esc.edu

Panel 10: Methodological Issues of Visual Data Collection, Production and Presentation

Chair: Luc Pauwels

This panel seeks to provide a forum for the in-depth discussion of a variety of critical aspects with respect to the methodological underpinning of visual research in the social sciences. The focus of the presentations should be on methodological, typological, or technological aspects in a more generic sense. This does not rule out papers that also have an Ôapplied' focus but it does mean that the presentation and discussion of visual methodology and related issues and their potential for applying them to different themes and fields should be highlighted. The aim of this panel is to contribute to the construction of a more solid and explicit theoretical and methodological basis for the use of visuals in social scientific research. These efforts may help to solidify visual research as a viable and credible alternative or complement to other types of social and cultural research.

Topics may include:

• Refined typologies or taxonomies of visual research.
• Presentation/discussion of new modes of visual research.
• Visual sampling and shooting strategies.
• Discussion of Ôbest practices' within a particular visual approach.
• Issues, dilemmas and opportunities in the collection/production, processing or presentation and use of visual data.
• The impact of new technologies on visual research.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Luc Pauwels, University of Antwerp
Email: luc.pauwels@ua.ac.be

Panel 11 : Visual sociology of religion

Chairs: Roberto Cipriani, and Emanuela del Re

There are very few sociologists of religion able to use both numeric solutions and digital tools, statistical frequency and cross fading,focalized interviews and video filming focusing on the eyes of the interviewee. In short, what appears to be lacking is not only some basic technical competence in the use and meaning of what one sees, but even a fundamental sensitivity towards a methodology which is not regarded as classic, although some classic authors have been outstanding precursors in this field: the couple GregoryBateson-Margaret Mead [1942], for instance, or the pioneer intuition of Howard Becker [1982] and a contemporary classic such as Bourdieu [1965].

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Emanuela Del Re, University "Sapienza", Rome
Roberto Cipriani, University of Rome 3
Email: rciprian@uniroma3.it

Panel 12: Visual Examination of school design and planning

Chair: Sheila Fram

This is a call for papers to compose a panel on the new and innovative ways images of various aspects of school design and planning are employed as data and research tools to examine current issues surrounding school built environments as contexts.

Sources of data may include but are not limited to:

• Subject or researcher produced photographs or videos/li>
• Photo elicitation
• Re-photography
• Archival or found photographic or video footage
• Architectural drawings or models
• Floor plans
• Propaganda and public relations documents produced by schools
• Images in architectural magazines
• Instructional manuals
• School policy documents
• ETC.

Presentation formats interactive in nature are preferred. Demonstrations of the use of collection or analysis methods need to be an essential component of the presentation. Presenters who have unique requirements for demonstrations must include such requirements in their proposal. Also, the presenter must organize presentation time accordingly, so as to not cut into the next presenter's allotted time. Due to the emphasis on the interactive nature of the presentation, only a limited number of proposals will be accepted to allow an appropriate amount of time for each presentation and a short question and discussion Panel at the end. Presentations are limited to 20 minutes.

Abstracts must include a presentation title, description of collection and analysis methods, an articulated argument and example of supporting data, and the significance of the study and method emphasized to your field of study. Please send 250 word (max) abstracts with a visual example (video frames, photos, copies of web pages, etc. are acceptable) and a 150 word (max) descriptive summary of demonstration to:

Sheila Fram, PhD
Educational Researcher
(affiliated with Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO)
Email: smfram@gmail.com

FIELDWORK

Panel 14: The contribution of visual techniques in the analysis of ethno-territorial conflicts.

Chairs: Anna Casaglia and Elena dell'Agnese

Social scientists working on ethno-territorial conflicts have rarely employed visual techniques as a method in field-research -- the analysis and the publication of results. War journalism and reportage still maintain an almost exclusive use of these techniques in these environments. The visual analysis of conflicting contexts can be a very useful tool to understand original aspects related to the conflict's consequences, for instance, mapping onto space and its representations. We refer to either research with images Ð that is the production of images in the field Ð or a cultural approach Ð preferring the analysis of visual products Ð the use of visual techniques that allow researchers to shed light on the complexity of conflicts and of the imaginaries connected to them.

The panel aims at discussing multidisciplinary research experiences that employ visual methods in the above described contexts, working towards the integration of this kind of approaches with the more classic research methods in the social sciences. Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Anna Casaglia, Ph.D. candidate Urban and Local European Studies, Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano Bicocca.
Elena dell'Agnese, Associate Professor of Economic and Political Geography, Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano Bicocca.
Email: a.casaglia@campus.unimib.it

Panel 15: Urban changes: the new city from downtown to suburbs

Chairs: Gabriele Manella and Marco Castrignanò

The panel will be focused on the several changes which occurred in the city over the last decades.

Indeed, almost everything has dramatically changed in a short time: landscape, population, houses and buildings, public spaces, streets and so on. Of course, images can be very important in stressing such change.

In particular, any topic which is connected to downtown and suburbs could be welcome to the panel.

With regard to downtown, many trends affected it: just to give a few examples, we can think of gentrification, the revitalization for tourist development, but also the new ghettos, poor neighborhoods and off-limits areas.

At the same time, suburbanization is an important and rapidly-changing trend, which characterizes more and more the urban structure. So-called urban sprawl is a phenomenon with many sub-definitions and implications, and it is increasing almost everywhere. Also in this case, many of its elements can be put into evidence through the use of images: the social, the economic, the architectural and the environmental ones.

To sum up, the purpose of this panel is to show how visual sociology can make a prominent contribution to urban studies. Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Gabriele Manella and Marco Castrignanò
Department of Sociology, University of Bologna
Email: gabriele.manella@unibo.it or marco.castrignano@unibo.it

Panel 16: Photography, architecture and built environments

Chair: Sheila Fram

This is a call for papers to compose a panel on examining architecture and built environments as context and in context via the use of photography. Recent sociological and educational research have included photographic images of architecture and built environments as data to be analyzed for context, dominant discourses and ideologies, as archives as institutions of power, and other forms of social communication. Presentations are limited to the use of photography, but can focus on public and private environments, spaces and places (e.g. schools, colleges, corporate buildings, office spaces, churches, synagogues, hospitals, play grounds, cafeterias, courtyards, archives with images of architecture, floor plans, architectural models, etc.). Also, presentations can focus on new and innovative ways of using photography to examine architecture and built environments. A wide variety of photographic formats will be considered (e.g. digital, found footage, black and white, etc.). Presentations are limited to 20 minutes to allow for questions and discussion Panels.

Proposals must include a presentation title, description of collection and analysis methods, an articulated argument with supporting data, and the significance of the study for your field of study.

Please send 300 word (max) abstracts with visual examples to:

Sheila Fram, PhD,
Educational Researcher
(affiliated with Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO)
Email: smfram@gmail.com

Panel 17: Visual educational research

Chair: Eric Margolis

One arena in which visual research is flourishing is Educational Research. This is a call for papers to compose a panel on visual research in and about schools. "Schools" can include anything from pre-kindergarten to graduate school. Studies of "alternative" schools: reform schools, orphanages, and schools for adjudicated persons are meant to be included. Emphasis may be on the social landscape(s) as perceived by administrators, teachers, students. Presentations may also focus on the built environment: school grounds, playing fields, buildings or furniture, for instance. Studies of "Virtual schools" will also be welcome. The panel is open to the entire range of visual methods.

Sources of data may include but are not limited to:

• subject or researcher produced photographs,
• photo elicitation,
• satellite or "Google Earth" images,
• GIS and/or ethnographic mapping incorporating images,
• historical photo analysis,
• repeat photography,
• visual ethnography,
• subject produced drawings or models,
• cartoons, films, television programs or other images from popular culture
• propaganda and advertising produced by schools
• Virtual environments (a la Second Life?) or visualizations

A wide variety of presentation formats will be considered from poster Panels, to short videos, to web sites. Presentations are limited to 20 minutes.

Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Eric Margolis, Associate Professor
Division of Educational Leadership
and Policy Studies
Arizona State University
Tempe AZ 85287-2411
Email: emmargolis@gmail.com

Panel 18: Window shopping seeking for identity within the consumption sphere.

Chairs: Roberta Paltrinieri and Piergiorgio Degli Esposti

Early in the twentieth century, scholars in a variety of disciplines began to recognize that consumption, or more properly consumerism, had become an important aspect of western culture.

Postindustrial societies are characterized by their mode of production: it has gone from one based on need to an economy based on want. That is to say that their economies are no longer optimized to fulfill existential needs, but rather to efficiently detect, produce and satisfy consumer wants, since the basic needs of their citizens have already been met. Having taken this approach, economic strategies have gained a special influence on cultural change, role playing patterns and rituals, as well as on how meaning and significance are ascribed. The fetish nature of brands and logos is a telling example of this.

The modern search for identity is based to a great extent on the acquisition of cultural codes. Due to a surge in the global supply of symbols that serve as substituting signifiers and are reinforced by the constant stimulation of our affects through the media, the consumer creates for him or herself a patchwork identity, made up of fragments stemming from a host of differing cultures.

Within this theoretical background the panel aims to aggregate papers focusing on aspects of the material culture and practices that can highlight or criticize the following key point:

• Cultural meanings are necessarily embodied (or "encoded") in every object we make.
• In acquiring or using (consuming) goods, we associate ourselves with the meanings embedded in those goods. These adopted meanings therefore become part of the perceived "self".
• Finding some membership indicators and possible genesis of consumer rituals and aggregations.
• Analysis of the structural features of the spaces and places dedicated to the consumption rituals and how the consumer is driven by the structure within those places.
• Subversive use of message from the consumer and even from the broadcast system of communication, generates phenomenon such as subvertising and cultural jamming.
• How consumer use their skill to reinforce or claim for a self constructed identity, trough consumption and prosumption practices.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Roberta Paltrineri and Piergiorgio Degli Esposti
Department of Sociology, University of Bologna, Italy
E-mail: roberta.paltrinieri@unibo.it, piergiorgio.degliesposti@unibo.it

Panel 19: Reading material culture

Chair: Domenico Secondulfo

Visual sociology plays an important role in the analysis of material culture in analysing the meanings and social uses of things utilized in Western society.

The structures of social meaning, the uses of objects, the way in which we use different systems of things, and communicative patterns are made visible when we use them in social contexts.

Traditional sociological techniques have never able to detect the linking patterns connecting objects to social meaning; patterns which, on the contrary, are easily captured by iconographic techniques which can investigate them from the analytical perspective of the anthropologist and the sociologist.

Visual methods and a visual sociology approach are the best and sometimes the only observational strategies which are capable of analyzing both the complexity and the richness of material culture; for example, furniture in a flat/room, things on a desk, clothes and accessories worn on a particular social occasion, things used (dishes, glasses, etc.) for the formal layout and setting of the dinner table for a special event.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Domenico Secondulfo University of Verona Email: domenico.secondulfo@univr.it

Panel 20: Healthscapes: Images of Health and Wellness

Chair: Antonio Maturo

Health and wellness hold a central position in contemporary society. Large strata of the population undergo a continuos process of self-surveillance and self-monitoring being extremely careful for what concern healthy lifestyles, organic food, fitness and gym. Increasingly, people try to use bicycles, eat healthy food and live in not polluted environment. This leads also towards a strong concern to the body and on what can improve and enhance it. Even fashion, shopping mall and consumption process show signs of this healthicization.

The aim of this panels is to describe and analyse Ð through advertising images, photography studies and videos Ð the growing importance of the "healthscape", that is the social processes and the social practices which are connected to the aim of increasing and enhancing people' health and wellness.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Antonio Maturo
Universitˆ di Bologna
+39 347.9329189
Email: tonio.maturo@gmail.com

Panel 21: The visual construction of human suffering.

Chairs: Pierluigi Musar˜ and Paola Parmiggiani

Due to globalization and new technologies we have a growing awareness of living in a world remarkably comfortable and absolutely poor at the same time. We watch live and direct disasters and suffering (war, famine, hurricane, etc.) all around the world.

Media and international humanitarian organizations have become proactive actors in the global arena of the representation of suffering.

The panel focuses on the visual construction of human suffering, with special reference to the signifying practices of the media and humanitarian campaign events.

The panel aims to focus on the "spectacle of suffering" proposing a reflection and discussion on the role, impact, effectiveness, limits and risks of the insistence on spectacular images of suffering, and the combination of humanitarian discourse of compassion for the victims.

In your paper, be sure to answer to some of the following questions:

• What do we actually get to know about global crisis and life of people involved in humanitarian emergencies?
• How does the representation of victims impact the frame of reference for our moral and social values?
• What kinds of responsibility have media and NGOs strategies of communication in building a respectable global citizenship?
• Could we focus humanitarian assistance as a substitute for political initiatives and solutions?

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Pierluigi Musar˜ and Paola Parmiggiani
Department of Sociology, University of Bologna, Italy
E-mail: pierluigi.musaro@unibo.it, paola.parmiggiani@unibo.it

Panel 22: Doing Work

Chairs: Valentina Cuzzocrea, Dawn Lyon and Lynne Pettinger.

A revived sociology of work demands that attention be paid to what it means to do work. We contend that a good visual sociology of work would incorporate images of (individual and collective) action and movement, of work as an activity as well as workers as representatives of their occupations (as in portraits). ÔDoing work' is inspired by a long tradition of sociological inquiry into the taken for granted. We are keen to explore the possibilities and limitations of images (and talk, sound, and objects) in undertaking research and producing understandings of ways of doing work that are practical, embodied or tacit.

We invite papers to this stream which represent and analyse Ôdoing work', reflecting the productive and creative act of working. We set no boundaries on what we consider Ôwork' to be: formal or informal, paid or unpaid, high status or low status, and are interested in how the visual can transform presumptions about and permit new insights into what work is. The theme of Ôdoing work' may be interpreted in several ways. Papers which consider the materiality of working (of craft, of producing) are welcomed. So too are those which consider how identity is formed through work, employment or occupation (or must be formed in order for work to be done). The theme might be approached through consideration of the spaces of work and spectacle of work. What does being visible as a worker mean for doing work? What forms of work are concealed? We welcome further interpretations of the theme of Ôdoing work'.

Abstracts of approximately 250 words in length should be sent as a Word document attachment. We accept abstracts written in English as well as in Italian.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Valentina Cuzzocrea, University of Cagliari
email cuzzocrea@unica.it
(Dawn Lyon, email d.m.lyon@kent.ac.uk, Lynne Pettinger, lmpett@essex.ac.uk.)

Panel 23: Military Images: Production, Presentation and Consumption

Chair: K. Neil Jenkings and Rachel Woodward

The representation of the military, whether through the image of service personnel, through depictions of military technology or representations of military landscapes, is all-pervasive, globally. . Military images range from factual representations in daily media reports of military conflict the repatriation of service personnel, humanitarian intervention and the crimes and misdemeanours of individual service personnel; to the fictional representation of the military in movies, documentaries, games and various forms of literature. The military is represented both in person and in image at recreational activities such as national sports events, air shows, Military Tattoos, County Fairs and local re-enactment societies. The military image is used at memorial events such as Armistice Day, Forces Day (Veterans Day), and their remembrance is made visual in architectural memorials at dedicated geographic locations and their attendant services, both official and unofficial. The military image is used commercially to sell, toys, games, movies, outdoor clothing and other forms of related equipment, and the fashion industry regularly draws upon military uniforms and camouflage in its collections both mainstream and haute couture. The military image can be either historical or contemporary, or a mixture of both, and its practices can be traditional or contemporary. This panel invites abstracts from those with an interest in the military image from any of the above - and beyond! The aim of the session is to have a diversity of papers on the production, presentation and consumption of the military image and to explore the manifestations of the military image and its social scientific analysis.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

K. Neil Jenkings and Rachel Woodward
Geography, Politics and Sociology,
Newcastle University. UK.
Email: neil.jenkings@newcastle.ac.uk

PUBLICATION OF RESULTS

Panel 24: ÔOur feature presentation': the visual sociologist at the movies

Chair: Gordon Simpson

This panel seeks to explore and take stock of some of the ways in which visually based sociological exploration currently engages with the world of mainstream cinema. Possible starting points for contributions here could include:

Conceptual approaches: the many ways in which researchers currently draw on visual cinema products as primary evidence of one sort or another in exploring sociological goals; methodologies, case studies, musings on the directions we could be heading in etc.

Administrative and copyright issues: formal processes of clearing and gaining approval for using mainstream film elements in research dissemination / presentation settings: perceptions and positions of Ôinterest', copyright differences internationally, case studies of successes, problems encountered etc.

Entry issues: the dynamics of trying to get your own sociologically / ethnographically generated filmic works into cinematic distribution systems; case studies of success or difficulty, competitions, specialist conferences, alternative screening settings through associations and clubs, the influence of the Ôimperative to entertain' etc.

Historical precedents: what today's research contexts might learn from specific cinematic pioneers or initiatives with credible sociological credentials, such as Vertov, Grierson, The American National Film and Photo League, the Tyneside Amber Films collective, etc. etc.

These though are very much only opening suggestions: anyone who recognises any dimension of their own work as echoing this broad paradigm is equally welcome. Our only caveat is that we would ask all our potential contributors to keep in mind the capacity of their particular interest to contribute precedents, lessons etc. applicable to the panel's overall goal - usefully informing the contemporary sociological researcher's understanding of possible engagement with current film contexts and circumstances.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Gordon Simpson, University of Cumbria, UK
Email: gordon.simpson@cumbria.ac.uk

Panel 25: Ethnografic film in sociological research and teaching at the university: scientific and organizational challenges

Chairs: Eva Flicker & Katharina Miko

Scientific research concerning visuality is always an interdisciplinary matter. Visual Sociology is a part of visual studies which encompasses Sociology, Social- and Cultural Anthropology, Contemporary History, Film sciences, Art History, and many more disciplines

Visual studies, visual methods, and visual sociology have long been embedded in social scientific practice. Early on, film found its place as a tool in scientific research. Visual Sociology, and especially Ethnographic Film, are not new specializations in the field of Sociology, but rather an area of science subjected to constant reevaluation. Roughly speaking, the use of images in social science gained significant popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century and again in the 1970's and 80Ôs. The early twentieth century saw the publication of articles by the American Sociological Association, which used images to support sociological findings. The movement in this direction was interrupted around 1916, when the use of qualitative methods induced the replacement of pictures and film through mathematical tables, graphs, and other empirical representations. Since then, academic institutionalization of visual sociology has only occurred in the form of journals, occasional teaching chairs, the founding of institutes, and professional associations such as the IVSA. Visual Sociology however, can hardly be considered mainstream Sociology.

This Panel focuses on Film-based visuality produced by social scientists, in short: on Ethnographic Film. Ethnographic Film as a social scientific method is torn between being a scientific approach and an artistic one. Even the label is ambiguous, as both the documentary and sociological film also exist. In order to successfully convey the intended content, the film makers need not only disciplinary and scientific proficiency, but also film related know-how. To create sociological film, it is not sufficient for the scientists to be competent in the field of sociology alone. They must equally embody knowledge of the technical and aesthetic aspects of film as a media. Technological developments in the fields of communications, photography, and film, are facilitating the frequent and widespread use of images and film in day to day life. This, no doubt, has a major effect on the context of research in this field. The flood of images induced by a media based society, as well as the overflow of film found in the internet and in web 2.0 have changed our ways of seeing. The criteria and expectations a viewer has when regarding any competitive media, are the same ones that scientific film is judged on. These requirements also effect education and curricula in a university context. How is it possible to convey to students, both an ethnographic and technical competence? How do these methodological approaches compare to other aspects of the methodology education?

The Panel intends to cover a wide spectrum of the use of Ethnographic Film as a part of Sociology in a university context:

• Facilitate an exchange between social scientific/sociological film makers, and attempt a definition of the term "ethographic Film"
• Debate on the university-institutionalization of education, especially taking into account the restructuring of curricula based on EU-Bologna
• Discuss the significance of ethnographic film within the sociology curricula
• Find out which scientific, organizational, and resource related questions have to be taken into account for a university institutionalization?

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes.

Please send the papers with about 500 words and a short CV to:

Eva Flicker & Katharina Miko
Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna / Austria
Email: eva.flicker@univie.ac.at

Panel 26: From the darkroom to the kitchen table: practices and places of visual media production

Chairs: Eric Laurier, Barry Brown and Neil Jenkings

At their outset darkrooms and cutting rooms were imagined to be places of mere mechanical reproduction, over the longer term they have turned out to be central to creative industry, imagination and representation in visual media. These sites and processes of production are an under-examined part of visual sociology, with a number of notable exceptions (e.g. Howie Becker's chapter on Editing in 'Art Worlds', 1982). In this panel we aim to bring together studies of what happens 'post-shooting' in the spaces constituting the studios, dark-rooms, control rooms and photoshops of the world. Editing encompasses a complex of hobbyist, craft and professional practices, yet it is often deleted in accounts of film, home video and photography. Moreover in the last decade these hobbies, crafts and professions have been transformed as technology has both popularised editing practices, and revolutionised amateur and professional techniques - digital media are as likely to be handled on the kitchen table on a laptop as in a professional studio.

We invite papers that explore empirically or theoretically the practices and processes that occur in post-capture production spaces: the editing that produces visual and video documents - film, photos, televisions shows and the like.

We are particularly interested in:

• ethnographic examinations of 'production cultures'
• interactional studies of real-time studio, editing suite and related professional
• practices
• analysis of workplaces specialising in visual materials
• theoretical examinations of post-production
• historical accounts of the emergence and shifts in photographic, film and video
• editing worlds

The session will broadly support approaches germane to studying the different routes through which media is assembled, configured and evaluated on the path to different media outlets.

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Eric Laurier, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh
Barry Brown, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego
Neil Jenkings, Institute of Health & Society, Newcastle University
Email: eric.laurier@ed.ac.uk

Panel 27: Representations in visual research: Content in context Ð reflexivity in question

Chair: Nela Milic

This panel will question the production of subjectivities (Greek, queer, conspiracy theorist, landscape artist, academic, young person) through theoretically guided empirical research. It will investigate the ways in which the audience sees the artwork and their potential to subvert norms in the society.

Researchers for this panel will employ a methodological approach combining visual ethnography and personal insights. Their reflexivity and subjectivity will be applied through photography or video as already part of the "local visual practice" (Pink 2001:34) used by the research participants. Throughout their projects, researchers are consciously bringing about the trouble of their own positionality in the production and representation of their work.

• "I am aware that different parts of my identity play a significant role in this ethnography. I am the friend of Fokas who used to work in the club, I am an ex-member of the team express yourself who organized drag parties, I am a photographer, I am someone who left Greece, I am a guy from the west suburbs of the Athens, I am a researcher, I am one of them, I am queer, I am in my thirties, I am Greek, I am their mirror." (Kostantinos Panapakidis, Goldsmiths University)
• Is the researcher a subject among other subjects or an object among other objects? How problematic are subjective understandings that have implications for the produced knowledge?
• How viable are the products of ethnographic researchers in terms of identity anonymity, documentation worth and appropriation for presentation purposes?
• "As an artist, I don't question my ability to make and present what I deem is a 'worthy' photodocumentation. However, amongst straightforward sociologist researchers, there was debate on inadequacy of their digital documentation to convey the content in context." (Krisanne Baker, ecological artist)
• "Conspiracy Theories" are reflexive knowledge generated in what Ulrich Beck calls 'sub politics' by a lack of trust in 'the official story' and the ability of key institutions to tell the truth about risk. Reflexivity for Beck is a "self-confrontation" with the foundations of modernity (instrumental rationality). What is Reflexive Modernization in 9/11 conspiracy theories distributed via the Internet? Content within the context? (David Rose, Goldsmiths University)
• Situatedness is the theme in Sireita Mullings (Goldsmiths University) practice where application of the visual is paramount in rendering creative encounters with youth. Her projects permit them to negotiate and articulate their own social constructs through a creative consciousness. She believes that reflexivity strengthens the creative engagement with young people who deploy photographic ways of exploring and understanding their own lives.
• "Reflexivity plays a dual role for both participant and practitioner as it is through this process the works of the artist researcher is generated as document of the relationship between the participant, art medium and its impact on the artist as practitioner and researcher."
• How interdependent is then the research on the researched and does visual research provides participants, artists, practitioners and researchers new ways of representing varying social truths?

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Nela Milic
Email: nela011@hotmail.com

Panel 28, 29, 30: Open Panels

Chair(s): To be announced
Panels 28, 29, 30 will be kept open for papers, abstracts and presentations that may not fit in any of the above panels. Please submit your abstract to this open panels session if you are unsure which panel is the best fit. If your paper is accepted, we will either accommodate your paper in one of the existing sessions or in one of the open theme sessions according to topic and subject. Please e-mail your abstract to Francesco Lapenta at visualsociology@gmail.com and use "IVSA2010 conference Open panels" as subject of your email.